Dallas is an American soap opera that revolves around the Ewings, a wealthy Texas family in the oil and cattle-ranching industries. The series won four Emmy Awards, including a 1980 Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series win for Barbara Bel Geddes.

Throughout the series, Larry Hagman stars as greedy, scheming oil baron J. R. Ewing. The show also starred stage/screen actress Barbara Bel Geddes as family matriarch Miss Ellie, and movie Western actor Jim Davis in his last role as Ewing patriarch Jock Ewing before his death in 1981.

The show debuted on April 2, 1978 as a five-part miniseries on the CBS network, and producers originally thought that would be it. But, because the popularity was so high, the show then was subsequently turned into a regular series and was broadcast for thirteen more seasons from September 23, 1978 to May 3, 1991. However, the first five episodes (originally viewed as a miniseries) are now considered to be the "first" season--so in all the series had fourteen seasons. Dallas was included in Time magazine's 2007 list of "100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME." By the time the show concluded in 1991 it had become one of the longest lasting primetime dramas in TV history...second only to Gunsmoke and Law & Order, which both tie as the longest lasting TV dramas with twenty seasons for each show. Dallas' spinoff Knots Landing also lasted the same number of seasons--fourteen. The show was also famous for its cliffhangers, including the "Who shot J.R.?" mystery, and the "Dream Season", in which the entirety of season eight was revealed to have been a dream of one of the characters.

Dallas ( /ˈdæləs/) is the third-largest city in the state of Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. Divided between Collin, Dallas, Denton, Kaufman, and Rockwall counties, the city had a population of 1,197,816 in 2010, according to the United States Census Bureau.

The city is the largest economic center of the 12-county Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area (the DFW MSA) that according to the March 2010 U.S. Census Bureau release, had a population of 6,371,773. The metroplex economy is the sixth largest in the United States, with a 2010 gross metropolitan product of $374 billion.

Dallas was founded in 1841 and was formally incorporated as a city in February 1856. The city's economy is primarily based on banking, commerce, telecommunications, computer technology, energy, healthcare and medical research, transportation and logistics. The city is home to the third largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the nation. Located in North Texas and a major city in the American South, Dallas is the main core of the largest inland metropolitan area in the United States that lacks any navigable link to the sea.

A television program (usually television programme outside North America), also called television show, is a segment of content intended for broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series. A single program in a series is called an episode.

A television series that is intended to comprise a limited number of episodes is usually called a miniseries or serial. Series without a fixed length are usually divided into seasons or series, yearly or biannual installments of new episodes. While there is no defined length, US industry practice tends to favor longer seasons than those of some other countries.

A one-time broadcast may be called a "special", or particularly in the UK a "special episode". A television movie ("made-for-TV movie" or television film), is a film that is initially broadcast on television rather than released in cinemas or direct-to-video, although many successful TV movies are later released on DVD.

A program can be either recorded—as on video tape or other various electronic media forms—or considered live television.

Linda Ann Gray (born September 12, 1940) is an American film, stage and actress, director, producer and former model, best known for her role as Sue Ellen Ewing on the television prime-time soap opera Dallas.

Linda Ann Gray was born in Santa Monica, California. Prior to acting, Gray working as a model in the 1960s and began her acting career in television commercials-nearly 400 of them, and also made brief appearances in the feature films, such as Under the Yum Yum Tree and Palm Springs Weekend in 1963.

Gray began her professional acting career in the 1970s, with guest roles on many television series such as Marcus Welby, M.D., McCloud and Switch. She also made appeared on films The Big Rip-Off (1975) and Dogs (1976).

In 1977 she was cast as fashion model Linda Murkland, the first transgender series regular on American television on the TV series All That Glitters. The show, a spoof of the soap opera format, was cancelled after just 13 weeks. Gray was then cast as suspicious wife Carla Cord in the 1977 television movie Murder in Peyton Place.

Patrick George Duffy (born March 17, 1949) is an American character actor of stage and film. He is best known for his role on the CBS television drama Dallas, where he played Bobby Ewing from 1978 to 1985 and from 1986 to 1991. Duffy will return to reprise his role as Bobby in a new up-to-date Dallas currently scheduled to air its 10-episode first season in Summer 2012. He is also well known for his role on the ABC television sitcom Step by Step as Frank Lambert, the husband of Carol Lambert, played by Suzanne Somers, from 1991 to 1998.

In 1976, Duffy landed the role of Mark Harris in the short-lived television series Man from Atlantis. Following the series' cancellation in early 1978, he got his big break in the role of Bobby Ewing on the TV series Dallas. The show became a worldwide phenomenon, ranking in the top 3 for the first half of the 1980s. Despite its success, Duffy opted to leave the series in 1985 with his character being killed off onscreen. However, with both the show and his career on the decline, he returned in 1986 in the infamous shower scene that rendered the entire 1985–1986 season "just a dream". Duffy then remained with the series until its cancellation in 1991. He also appeared in several episodes of the spin-off series Knots Landing between 1979-82. Throughout the 13-year run of Dallas, Duffy directed several episodes of the series. In 1992, he began a role of the public announcing host and Pete's rival, Harold Hatchback (which is from Rob Paulsen's voice role) in the episode, "Buddy Building" from Goof Troop.