Few individuals sufficiently old to be awake throughout prime-time hours within the Eighties emerged from the period with out encountering the work of Mr. Jacobs, a onetime nonfiction author who delivered to tv a literary sensibility that helped broaden prevailing notions of what the medium may do.
TV writers on the time typically went unheralded, with movie star reserved for the on-screen expertise and the characters they delivered to life. So whereas Mr. Jacobs was not a family title, his creations have been — as evidenced by the ubiquity of the catchphrase “Who shot J.R.?,” a reference to a plot level in probably the most well-known episode of “Dallas.”
J.R. Ewing, memorably portrayed by actor Larry Hagman, was the dastardly oil baron on the middle of “Dallas,” which premiered on CBS in 1978 and aired for greater than 350 episodes earlier than its unique run resulted in 1991.
A saga concerning the intrigue and affairs, lust and revenge of an prosperous Texas oil and ranching household, the present attracted tens of tens of millions of viewers, changing into one of the vital watched packages on tv.
Robert Thompson, a professor of tv and fashionable tradition at Syracuse College in New York, ranks “Dallas” among the many most influential leisure packages within the historical past of TV.
When “Dallas” premiered, serialized cleaning soap operas aired within the afternoon, however most prime-time night programming was episodic, permitting viewers to tune in and observe any installment with out having seen the earlier ones.
“Dallas,” in contrast, adopted within the custom of the Sixties prime-time cleaning soap “Peyton Place,” with a story that developed over the course of the season and the present.
“One of many issues that make tv an artwork kind like no different is the concept that it might probably inform tales that carry on going and going and going,” Thompson stated in an interview.
By demonstrating to TV executives that serialization could possibly be profitable not solely within the afternoon but additionally throughout prime time, he added, “Dallas” helped pave the way in which for acclaimed packages of more moderen years together with “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Mad Males” and “Breaking Dangerous.”
“All of the issues that we now worth [in television] are primarily based on the flexibility to develop tales over time, to develop characters over time,” Thompson stated. “What would ‘The Wire’ have been if each single episode solved a brand new crime?”
“Dallas” was additionally notable, in accordance with Thompson, for putting an ignoble character within the main function, versus the extra heroic figures typically featured in dramatic tv as much as that time. As a “manipulative, Machiavellian, evil character,” Thompson stated of J.R., he “opened up rather more subtle territory” for tv.
Mr. Jacobs had resisted stress on the set to melt the character of J.R. “If the present was to be successful, we’d want the evilest, baddest kind of man for the central character,” he instructed The Washington Put up in 1979. “Greater and badder than life.”
Mr. Jacobs shifted his focus early within the run of “Dallas” — earlier than the tour de power “Who shot J.R.?” episode — to work on “Knots Touchdown,” one other soapy hit that aired on CBS from 1979 to 1993. Set in a Southern California cul-de-sac, the present adopted the decidedly much less sordid lives of a number of middle-class {couples}, together with one drawn from “Dallas.”
Though not as influential as its predecessor, “Knots Touchdown” was additionally wildly fashionable and in some methods represented what Thompson described as Mr. Jacobs’s better “creative achievement.”
“There was by no means something bigger-than-life about ‘Knots,’” Mr. Jacobs instructed the Wall Road Journal in 1989. “If you watch ‘Dallas,’ you’re watching them. If you watch ‘Knots,’ you’re watching us.”
David Arnold Jacobs was born in Baltimore on Aug. 12, 1939. His father, he told the Television Academy Foundation in an oral historical past, was a bookie, a billiards champion, a crooner and a songwriter earlier than his mom, a homemaker, “took him away from all that.”
Mr. Jacobs remembered his father with immense affection and mirrored sadly on how a lot he despised the roles — driving a cab, promoting insurance coverage, laboring in a lamp manufacturing facility — that he held right down to help the household. Rising up, Mr. Jacobs recalled, he watched his father and instructed himself, “I’m by no means going to try this. I’m by no means going to go to work hating what I do.”
Mr. Jacobs was enchanted by films as a boy and stated he went 19 occasions to see “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” starring Humphrey Bogart.
He was, by his personal account, a poor pupil however a precocious artist and enrolled on the Maryland Institute School of Artwork to review portray, receiving a Bachelor of Wonderful Arts diploma in 1961. He moved instantly to New York, the place he did graduate work in artwork historical past at Hunter School, and the place he turned a author for Grolier encyclopedias.
Within the early years of his profession, Mr. Jacobs wrote nonfiction books, some for younger adults and a few for common readers, on matters together with Renaissance portray, the Byzantine Empire, a New York police precinct, and the lives of composer Ludwig van Beethoven, President Woodrow Wilson and silent-movie star Charlie Chaplin.
Mr. Jacobs additionally wrote quick tales and journal articles, lots of them about structure, and later mirrored that the work ready him nicely for a profession in TV writing.
“I had by no means deliberate it that means, however writing for magazines is the proper apprenticeship for tv,” the Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying. “It’s a must to construct the character quick, and it’s important to write dramatically. The nonfiction helped with the scale and the technical restrictions, and the fiction bought me into the form of storytelling that you just want in tv.”
Mr. Jacobs’s first marriage was to Lynn Oliansky. Once they divorced and she or he moved with their daughter to Los Angeles, Mr. Jacobs adopted in 1976. His former spouse turned his agent, and her husband, John Pleshette, acted in “Knots Touchdown.”
Mr. Jacobs was a narrative editor and author for reveals together with the crime sequence “Kingston: Confidential” and “Household,” a drama with govt producers together with Aaron Spelling, earlier than “Dallas” premiered.
Though “Dallas” preceded “Knots Touchdown” on the air, Mr. Jacobs pitched “Knots Touchdown” first to TV executives. He primarily based his idea on director Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a Seventies TV miniseries that was tailored for movie.
When Mr. Jacobs and his inventive accomplice, Michael Filerman, offered the concept to a manufacturing firm, executives replied that they needed “one thing glitzier. Extra of a saga.”
“As quickly as we left, as we’re driving again,” Mr. Jacobs instructed Texas Month-to-month in 2018, “I stated, ‘Effectively, a saga. Meaning Texas ranches.’” He had visited Texas solely as soon as and had by no means been to Dallas.
After “Dallas” and “Knots Touchdown,” Mr. Jacobs co-created “Paradise,” a western that aired on CBS from 1988 to 1991, and “Our bodies of Proof,” which aired from 1992 to 1993, a couple of staff of murder detectives together with one performed by George Clooney.
Greater than three a long time after its premiere, “Dallas” was given a short-lived reboot on TNT, with Hagman reprising his function as J.R. earlier than his loss of life in 2012.
Mr. Jacobs’s survivors embody his spouse of 44 years, the previous Diana Pietrocarli of Los Angeles; a daughter from his first marriage, Albyn Corridor of London; two youngsters from his second marriage, Aaron Jacobs of Fairfax, Calif., and Molly Jacobs of Los Angeles; and two granddaughters.
Reflecting on the recognition of “Dallas,” with its depiction of decadent extravagance, Mr. Jacobs instructed an interviewer that the present “represents the start of an period” that ended with the monetary collapse of 2008 — a time “through which all of our values as a individuals have been terribly screwed up.”
“I feel ‘Dallas’ was making an attempt — a minimum of in my head and coronary heart — to point out that,” he stated, in accordance with the Hollywood Reporter. “It was by no means making an attempt to glorify that world.”
