ABSTRACT
Into the midst of the 1980s academic debate about popular media forms and the concurrent political debate about American cultural imperialism came a book from Holland about the paradigmatic series in both discourses, Dallas, which was by then successfully exported to ninety countries, and on its way to becoming the common currency of global television. In fact some would say that familiarity with the Ewings was virtually the only thing that viewers round the world had in common. But how could something so quintessentially American cross wide cultural chasms? While American communications experts used a content analysis of Dallas to take the temperature of the contemporary United States, others began to investigate how non-American viewers made sense of it.
