J.R. slumps to the floor after being shot.

"Dallas" was a pioneering prime time big budget TV series that ruled the airwaves in the late 70s and 80s. At the end of the '79-'80 season J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) was shot by an unseen assailant and CBS spent the summer playing up the mystery of who could have shot down the head of the powerful Ewing clan. The suspense was only heightened by the fact that the start of the '80-'81 season was delayed by two months due to an actors strike in Hollywood. Bookies all over the world were taking bets on who did it. "Who shot JR?" became the catch phrase of the year. Jimmy Carter joked that if he knew who shot JR he'd have had no problem raising money for his presidential re-election campaign.

The suspense finally ended on November 21, 1980 when it was revealed J.R.'s black-hearted mistress Kristin Shepard (Mary Crosby) was the one who pulled the trigger, driven to her crime of passion during a fit of rage. The show became the highest rated TV episode in history to that time drawing an estimated 83,000,000 viewers in the US alone.