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.