Nobody really remembers, but it's a question that changed the modern TV landscape forever. It was also August. Exactly 26 years ago. By coincidence Dallas is currently being rebroadcast on South African television.
An even bigger co-incidence is the fact that the very episode that's now seen as the TV hour that changed television forever by ushering in the (in)famous cliffhanger season finale went out in August exactly 26 years later.
This past Wednesday (9 August) e.t
v broadcast the episode entitled "A House Divided" that catapulted the show into the pop culture stratosphere when oil baron J.R. Ewing bites a bullet in the last shocking seconds.
A whole new generation of South Africans and everyone who's never seen it for themselves, can now ask ''Who shot J.R?'' again.
South African restaurants were already closing on Tuesday evenings a while before 1980. TV was still very new in South Africa and folks stayed home in droves, huddling around the living rooms of people who had sets to watch the intrigue, wealth and alcoholism that defined the glitzy show.
(Did you know that Dallas still holds the record as the TV show with the most glasses of drink ever poured during the course of a show? That Sue Ellen was perpetually battling the bottle and J.R. was almost never seen without a whiskey glass in the hand.)
Dallas was a popular prime time soap worldwide but after this particular episode it immediately became THE show. The number one show and most buzzed about story in the world.
Before that a TV season would whimper out with the last of usually 26 episodes before the show's production would rest during the American summer. All storylines were nicely tied together and all the conflict and drama resolved.
Then Dallas happened and suddenly shows simply had to end with an unbelievable cliffhanger - just like the soapylike sci-fi movie serials from the fifties. Now viewers had to wait at least half a year or often longer to find out what would happen next and who shot J.R. became the refrain for what TV evolved into.
Since then TV producers try to outdo each other by upsetting viewers to keep them (and the media!) guessing by inventing more and more outrageous and shocking season finales.
As was the case of Dallas - where five different alternative perpetrators were filmed - these days TV's biggest shows also film multiple alternative endings to keep the media and rabid fans in the dark.
What could be better for buzz and to make people remember to come back and tune in than months of feverish speculation about what will happen next with your favourite characters who you've built such an emotional bond with?
Who in Dynasty lives and who dies after the wedding guests are gunned down in machine gun fire at the Moldovia wedding? Is that blood on Alexis' dress?
Who lives and who dies when a flat called Melrose Place is blown up by a psychopath? Is there hope for Captain Picard who's assimilated and turned in Locutus while the defenseless Enterprise languishes in space before a Borg cube?
Will Skollie escape prison and reunite with his son? (South African audiences had to pay to go to the movies to watch the two hour conclusion to this local drama!)
And can it be. . .could it be ... that it's not Monica but her bridesmaid Rachel who's pregnant? And who's the daddy!? Did Buffy really die to save the world? Yes. TV viewers have had to develop strong hearts to stomach all the cliffhangers we've experienced the past 25 years.
But back to Dallas's shocking episode. It wasn't Pamela Ewing who pulled the trigger. Victoria Principal was one of the actors who DIDN'T film a scene in which she was the culprit.
Mary Crosby (J.R.'s despised sister in law Kristin), J.R.'s estranged wife Sue Ellen and his dad Jock all filmed scenes in which they shoot him and watch while he falls to the ground clutching his heart. And what's the answer to the question and who was guilty in the cliffhanger question: "Who shot J.R?" (Click on the Spoiler! tag if you don't know and want to.)
Spoiler!
But that's not what people remember. And it wasn't about a question after all.
It's how TV makes us wonder and keeps us in suspense. It's how TV manages to get us to coming back to watch some more again.
To think it all started with a shot in the dark.