'Dallas' hit a chord back in the late Seventies and Eighties because it was the age of greed: here you have this unapologetic character who is mean and nasty and ruthless and does it all with an evil grin. I think people related to JR back then because we all have someone we know exactly like him. Everyone in the world knows a JR.
We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.
