Category: Great TV Concepts

True Confessions -- A secret about my vast knowledge base….

Well, those that know me well know that one of my areas of expertise is the oil business and the energy industry as a whole.  Indeed, now and then I will get calls from friends and acquaintances near and far, all across the fruited plain and even abroad.  I have always been flattered by their reaching out to me when they have a question about the oil business or energy policy!

Well, now the truth can be told: everything I know about the oil business I learned watching the classic tv series Dallas in its first run!  My education starts way back at the tender age of 10, when Dallas first debuted in the Spring of 1978!

For 14 long seasons I stuck with the folks at Dallas, through thick and thin!  It’s really something that the series finally wrapped things up in 1991, when I was in my first year of law school!

The formula was simple -- adapt the basic daytime soap opera approach to a weekly nighttime series, load up the cast, deliver pathos and PG rated sexual situations, and watch the ratings soar!  And soar they did!

And best of all I don’t pay property tax

Television’s house of ideas, Glen A Larson, has created so many great, enduring television shows that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. But one show stands tall even among that tough field. BJ & The Bear

You could count on Mr. Larson to consistently rip off the flavor of the month. For example, when Star Wars became a monster hit in theaters, he followed with Battlestar Galactica on tv. So when audiences responded favorably to the 1977 big screen action/comedy Smokey & The Bandit, Larson took some elements from the film and quickly created his own show.

So in the tv version, we have a rascally truck driver (BJ, rather than ‘Bandit’ and his pet chimp named ‘Bear’ (instead of a pet orangutan as in Smokey) relentlessly pursued by Sheriff Lobo (rather than Sheriff Justice). The basic dynamic from Smokey & The Bandit was intact, though the tv version would have none of the star power of the film -- no Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, nor Sally Field.

A pilot movie was broadcast by NBC in 1978, and it proved popular enough for the network to green light a series. BJ & The Bear lasted three seasons on NBC, for an impressive 48 episodes. It even launched a spinoff based around Claude Akins’s character, Sheriff Lobo.

Each episode usually involved BJ and Bear discovering some criminal or immoral activity, and usually a pretty woman in some sort of distress. BJ would then bend the rules a bit to solve the problem, usually with some action and comedy to please fans of all ages.

In a later season, BJ started his own trucking company out of Los Angeles, and he hired 7 beautiful lady truckers -- Samantha, Cindy, Angie, Callie, twins Geri & Teri, and my personal favorite Stacks, as portrayed by the lovely Judy Landers. They would find adventures together. Sometimes Andre the Giant would show up and hang out with them, too.

In other words, this is clearly one of the greatest tv shows of all time.

So sit back and enjoy the opening credits & theme song to one of the great television concepts of all time, BJ & The Bear.

While some folks may be so cynical as to decry the credibility of the basic concept of the show, I have always maintained that the most incredible thing in the show opening is not that an adult male trucker’s best friend is a chimpanzee, but rather that somewhere out on the highways of America there is at least one young, foxy lady truck driver.

The next season introduced seven more young, foxy lady truckers, propelling the show into science fiction.