Larry Hagman Passes, But the Show Will Go On: Season 2 of the New "Dallas" Still Reportedly On Track for Late January Premiere...

I was thinking about it this weekend after hearing the sad news of Larry Hagman's death: I'm not sure how they wheeled his old carcass out there at all in Season 1!  He was over 80 and has been in generally bad health for years now.  Hell, at one point in Season 1, his villianous "J.R. Ewing" character was tooling around the Cattle Baron's Ball with a damn walker!

True enough, Hagman's performance as J.R. was excellent and didn't suffer a bit, although it was clear that his poor health and age limited his on-screen time and limited his J.R. character to almost secondary character status (similar to that of fellow aging "Dallas" alum Ken Kercheval ("Cliff Barnes")).

So my initial gut reaction after hearing of Hagman's passing (i.e., "Well that's gonna be the end of 'Dallas'") was likely premature.  Indeed, word Monday (link below) is that TNT still plans to go forward with Season 2 starting January 28...

Hagman had reportedly finished shooting 6 of the new season's 15 episodes, and his death (or least that of "J.R.") will apparently be wrapped into the storyline for the second half of the season -- which itself opens up all sorts of possibilities, including (just a random guess) a "Who Shot J.R. Revisited" cliffhanger episode.

Something like that (and again, just my speculation) may necessitate partial use of a computer-generated J.R.  But that worked well for the final TV scene of Mama Soprano and all of the recent film appearances of Star Wars' "Yoda," so why not also for Hagman and his inconic J.R. Ewing?  Just please trim those nasty devil's horn eyebrows off the CGI J.R.!

http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/26/dallas-producers-at-work-on-hagman-farewell/