Patrick Duffy returned to "Dallas" in 1986 after being absent for an entire season. The whole year's worth of episodes was written off entirely as Pam's dream. The storyline garnered the show a lot of publicity, both good and bad. The Staff of UGO Networks.com said: "Soap Operas are known (and at times hated) for their ridiculously implausible storylines, and while '80s primetime suddser "Dallas" is still one of our favorite guilty pleasures, even the great Ewing empire is not immune to the absurd storytelling techniques the genre has become associated with. While your average primetime soap operas don't usually mingle with the stuff of sci-fi and horror, there's an incredibly high rate of characters returning from the dead in the genre. Case in point: Bobby Ewing. Presumed dead after being run over by his sister-in-law, Katherine Wentworth, who also happened to be obsessed with him, fans (and CBS) had to do without Patrick Duffy, and even worse, ratings, for one whole season. Thus, Larry Hagman, who played Duffy's onscreen brother and despised oil baron J.R. Ewing, along with network execs, persuaded Duffy to return, making it possible (we're talking in soap opera terms here), for Bobby Ewing's character to come back by writing off the ratings nightmare of a season as a dream... a very bad one."