Dallas to get its own Melrose Place-style update

After four-plus years of threatening everything from a Brady Bunch Movie-style spoof to a “very serious, post-Enron” exercise in faux-profound hamhandedness, Hollywood will apparently just not be able to sleep at night if it doesn’t find a way to remake Dallas. The ’80s drama about a family of Texas oil scions who variously fuck and fuck over each other on their way to realizing Reagan’s dream for America has been a candidate for a reboot since at least 2004, and has at one time had stars like John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez and even Ben Stiller attached to it. Unfortunately, various disagreements over story and tone caused the project to stagnate, as seemingly no one could agree on how seriously they should be taking this. Is Dallas a biting commentary on greed, or just a bedroom farce starring a bunch of rich yokels with big hair? Now it looks like Twentieth Century Fox’s long-gestating plans to finally answer that question may end up being totally moot, as Warner Bros. is currently working up a new TV version of Dallas for TNT that should beat any big-screen reboot to the punch, possibly as early as next year.