9 Most Fan-Pleasing Moments In Television

Actor Patrick Duffy’s decision to leave primetime soap sensation Dallas at the height of his success in the part of dashing young oil tycoon Bobby Ewing caused a whole heap of problems. While Duffy wanted to pursue other avenues in his career while he was still able to take advantage of them, fans were horrified at his character’s death at the climax of season eight, run over by his obsessed sister-in-law.

With significant outcry, the fans voted with their feet. Ratings for the subsequent season weren’t the greatest, and neither was Patrick Duffy’s much-vaunted career once he’d become a free agent. It wasn’t long before both Dallas and Duffy were looking to reconcile… but how, given that Bobby had been dead a year and that everyone had moved on?

The decision was made to retcon the entirety of season nine as a dream, Bobby’s wife Pam waking to find him in the shower as though nothing had ever happened. To keep it a secret, Bobby’s appearance in the shower was filmed entirely separately to Pam’s own scene, and in the context of a faked shower cream commercial for Patrick Duffy: no one aside from the show’s producers and Duffy himself knew that this was how Bobby would return to the show. That even extended to Victoria Principal, playing Pam – ironically, she was under the impression that Pam’s shocked reaction was to finding a dead body in the shower.

Hilariously, Dallas spin-off Knots Landing had crossover ties with many of the events of the dream season nine, and that show’s producers felt that altering their own continuity was a step too far. Essentially, that means that the final few seasons of Knots Landing diverge from mainstream Dallas continuity – they’re more or less a continuation of that alternate universe that Pam Ewing dreamed up.