The creator of the iconic soap opera “Dallas” knew next to nothing about the Texas city — and to anyone familiar with Dallas itself, it definitely showed.
In fact, creator David Jacobs — a Baltimore, Maryland native — knew very little about Texas as a whole, and he didn’t even visit Dallas before writing a set of five episodes for a potential miniseries in the show’s infancy. Jacobs asked his creative partner, producer Michael Filerman, if he should visit the town before getting started, but his partner assured him he could go after he wrote. That ultimately proved to be the wrong choice.
“I said, ‘Okay. I’ll write the stereotypes, and then I’ll go to Dallas later and pull it back.’ So I wrote the stereotypes, and then we all went to Dallas,” Jacobs told Texas Monthly. “When I got down there, I realized I’d really been writing Houston. Houston was the oil town; I didn’t know that Dallas was the banking town.”…