‘Dallas’ Stars Were Livid Over Classic Series’ Infamous Creative Choice

It’s been 37 years since the CBS soap opera Dallas pulled off one of the biggest plot twists in television history when it was revealed in the Season 9 finale that Patrick Duffy’s Bobby Ewing was alive after initially being killed off at the end of Season 8. Leading up to the big reveal, the entire season ended up being a dream of Bobby’s wife Pam (Victoria Principal), and the final scene of the season is her finding her dead husband in the shower. The surprise return had mixed reactions from fans, and now the cast is speaking out about it as well.

To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the series, the cast had a reunion, and Steve Kanaly, who portrayed Ray Krebbs, tells PEOPLE that not everyone watching wanted to see Bobby back as it was “about a 10 percent audience loss, at least from that, because people were offended to see the [death] storyline just tossed.” It wasn’t just the fans, however, as Kanaly revealed, “I don’t want to mention them, but various cast members were pissed because their storylines were lost as a result of that. And it had a big impact.” 

Considering it was a pretty big twist and the cast had initially thought that that was the end of Patrick Duffy on the series, it makes sense that some of the cast felt that way about the storyline. Not only that but because Season 9 was all a dream, whatever happened in the 31-episode season did not actually happen, as none of it was canon except for the very end when Pam woke up and saw Bobby in the shower. It’s hard to imagine that too many of them would have been pleased after getting that news, but fans can watch it on Amazon Freevee to see how they feel about it. 

It has been almost 40 years since that twist, and it seems like much of the cast is still friendly with each other, if not close. So if anyone still has any pent-up feelings about it, it’s not like much can be done about it now, but their feelings were definitely valid back in the day. Hopefully, it didn’t cause too much tension on set, but since the series went on for three more seasons after Bobby came back to life, it didn’t hurt the show or the cast too much.