It was television’s biggest cliffhanger: “Who Shot J.R.?” By the time Dallas‘ Season 4 installment “Who Done It?” aired on Nov. 21, 1980, the mystery had become a global phenomenon. Fans had spent eight agonizing months since the Season 3 finale — “A House Divided” — speculating nonstop about who pulled the trigger.
Dallas, the primetime soap centering on Texas oil titan Jock Ewing (Jim Davis) and his wealthy, feuding family, had only been on the air two years. Yet Jock’s oldest son, the deliciously devious J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), had already become the show’s breakout character and would even return for the 2012 revival.
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And while J.R. survived the shooting, the identity of his attacker was hotly debated in the months leading up to the “Who Done It?” premiere — and even wagered on, to the point where multiple people offered bribes to the episode’s writer, Loraine Despres, to spill the beans.
“I had a friend who was a lawyer and he said, ‘Loraine, tell me who did it. I’ll fly to London, place bets for us, and it’ll be perfectly legal,’” Despres tells Gold Derby. “And I said, ‘I’m not telling you.’”
The second bribe attempt was even stranger. “I used to take an exercise class at a neighbor’s house, and her husband was a weightlifter and kind of a minor thug,” Despres says. “After class he invited me into his garage gym. I thought, ‘If he tries to beat me up, I’ll tell him.’” Fortunately, it never came to that — and his offer to take the secret to Las Vegas and split the winnings wasn’t any more tempting than her lawyer friend’s.
When “Who Done It?” finally aired, it became the second-highest-rated primetime broadcast in TV history, surpassed only by the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H. Part of the success came from how tightly the Dallas secret was kept — even the cast was clueless.
Victoria Principal, who played Pam Ewing, wife of Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy), tells Gold Derby that showrunner and director Leonard Katzman filmed fake “shooter” scenes with several actors in case the truth leaked. Principal was hesitant to participate, worried the footage might be misused to implicate Pam, which she “did not want.”
“He said, ‘Action!’” she recalls. “I took a few steps, landed on the mark, raised the gun, and began to drool — spit ran over my bottom lip and down my chin — and I pulled the trigger. Lenny burst out laughing, yelled ‘Cut!’ and said, ‘Thank you, Ms. Principal. That is completely useless.’”
The drool gag was something she learned from Hagman himself. “He would do the drool whenever I wore a bathing suit,” she says. “So I did the drool that I learned from Larry, while [pretending to be] shooting Larry.” (Hagman died in 2012 at the age of 81.)
Popular suspects at the time included J.R.’s wife Sue Ellen (Linda Gray), her lover Dusty Farlow (Jared Martin), and J.R.’s mother, Miss Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes). But in the end, the culprit was revealed as Kristin Shepard (Mary Crosby), Sue Ellen’s younger sister — and J.R.’s mistress — who uses her pregnancy to keep him from going to the police. (He later learns he isn’t the father.)
“When it became such a big deal, the last four pages were deleted from the scripts so that the cast and crew wouldn’t know and couldn’t go and bet,” Despres explains. Showrunners even considered swapping the culprit to Sue Ellen if news leaked early.
Fans had to wait until Episode 4 of Season 4 to learn the truth — a delay caused partly by the SAG-AFTRA strike of 1980. According to Principal, the cast held a viewing party and learned the truth right alongside the rest of the world.
The wait paid off. Forty-five years later, “Who Done It?” remains the most famous Dallas episode and a landmark in television history. Despres — who also wrote two other episodes in Season 3 and later authored the novels The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc (2002) and The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell (2005) — attributes the show’s longevity to its strong early writing.
“It was very well written, particularly in the first years,” she says.
Principal, who went on to run her own production company, write several health-and-wellness books, and launch a skincare brand, puts it more simply: “I think it’s very hard to articulate magic.”
“It was the first show to ever become a worldwide phenomenon,” she adds. “Lenny was really worried that the audience would lose interest waiting to learn who shot J.R., but instead it just grew around the world. That episode changed everything.”
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
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