The Creator Of Dallas Knew Nothing About The Texas City — And It Showed

The creator of the iconic soap opera “Dallas” knew next to nothing about the Texas city — and to anyone familiar with Dallas itself, it definitely showed.

In fact, creator David Jacobs — a Baltimore, Maryland native — knew very little about Texas as a whole, and he didn’t even visit Dallas before writing a set of five episodes for a potential miniseries in the show’s infancy. Jacobs asked his creative partner, producer Michael Filerman, if he should visit the town before getting started, but his partner assured him he could go after he wrote. That ultimately proved to be the wrong choice.

“I said, ‘Okay. I’ll write the stereotypes, and then I’ll go to Dallas later and pull it back.’ So I wrote the stereotypes, and then we all went to Dallas,” Jacobs told Texas Monthly. “When I got down there, I realized I’d really been writing Houston. Houston was the oil town; I didn’t know that Dallas was the banking town.”

According to former Dallas Times Herald columnist Jim Schutze, the show’s trademarks were unmistakably reminiscent of the other major town. “[The show] was everything that Dallas felt that it was not,” he explained to Texas Monthly. “The boots, the hats, the ranching, the oil. That was all Houston.”

David Jacobs has been open about his limited experience with Texas, noting to Texas Monthly that he drove through the state only once back in 1972 during a camping trip with his daughter. That limited experience may explain why his version of Texas differed so heavily from reality.

The show, which starred the late Larry Hagman, was originally conceived as a version of Ingmar Bergman’s seminal classic “Scenes from a Marriage.” Jacobs and Michael Filerman pitched a project in that style, but were asked to make something bigger in scope. After deciding to center the story on a Texan family, Filerman opted to title the show “Dallas,” thinking they might change it, and even the setting, later. But the network liked what they had, and the rest was history.

The 1978 series ended up being a major predecessor to the 2018 hit “Yellowstone,” but audiences generally view the modern Western as an accurate depiction of its world. “Dallas,” despite its major success over the years and an eventual (but short-lived) revival series, cannot say the same.