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| Warner Horizon/TNT |
| Cynthia Cidre and Patrick Duffy on the set of TNT's coming-this-summer Dallas reboot |
I'll be honest with you: I don't know squat about Dallas. Or rather, I don't know squat about Dallas, the long-running, oil-drenched, big-haired, family-feuding epic that may still color how a lot of outsiders think about our city. When I found out some eight months ago that I'd landed this job and would be moving here, a lot of people immediately suggested I watch the whole damn series, all 13 years of it, to "get ready." Kind of like the way you get ready to be an astronaut by watching Mars Attacks. Somehow, Dallas never quite made it to the top of my Netflix queue. I just wasn't interested. (Although Larry Hagman's recent, delightful, drug-tinged New York Times magazine interview almost made me reconsider.)
Cynthia Cidre's ready for people like me. She's the creator, executive producer and head writer of the brand-new Dallas, which, as you surely must be aware by now, started shooting here in October and will premiere on TNT this June. She spoke Friday night at the KD College, at the monthly meeting of the Dallas Screenwriters Association. She took questions about a whole host of things, chief among them making the show relevant for a new audience while at the same time trying to bring back the original show's devotees.
Cidre too was never a huge Dallas fan before beginning work on the new series, she said. "I had seen maybe five episodes total," she told the audience, and found it "somewhat campy," especially the later seasons. It couldn't have been further from the work she'd done before; most of her career, she'd been writing "action movie and cop shows." So she found it "peculiar," she said, to be asked to write the pilot for the new Dallas, which is conceived of as a continuation of the show: The original characters have aged, and their current lives, and those of their now-grown children, make up the new story lines.
Cidre found her inspiration not in the increasingly overblown later years of the show, she said, but at its very beginning. "If you watch early Dallas, it was just a really solid family drama," she said. "It didn't go campy till years later. That really spoke to me."
But I had to ask: Why should ignoramuses like me give a damn about any of the characters, old or new? Cidre smiled. "TNT thinks the young people in it will be interesting and attractive enough" to draw audiences, she said. The word 'Dallas' she said, is "a brand, like Levi Jeans or Stetson is. ... If you have a show called Des Moines, nothing against Des Moines, but people aren't as likely to watch."
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