One thing that always killed me about Dallas was the drinking that went on in that show. Not so much Sue Ellen with her alcoholism problem the show liked to capitalize on, but the whole damn family, holy shit JR drank as much as Sue Ellen and while he was working! But the show dismissed that as "alright and perfectly normal".
The reality is no one could drink like they did day in and day out and run an oil company efficiently, so in that sense I agree about Dallas being somewhat a fantasy, because its a fantasy to be able to drink like that without suffering repercussions, both in your family life and business. It doesn't work, sorry.
JR would start drinking at his office very early, offering drinks to his cartel, and when they declined stating it was too early in the day he'd get real serious and say "ok, then lets get down to business". The thing is everyone in the Ewing family was drinking at every opportunity, serious hard liquor. But no one ever got accused of drinking too much but Sue Ellen, yeah right. In real life JR and the rest of the family would have been as much an alcoholic as she was.
In the last years of Dallas they knocked off everyone drinking all the time, instead they had tea and coffee. The show purposely did that because they were getting heat from people that the show was a bad influence, so they decided to stop drinking on the show, and when they had something it was non-alcoholic.
To me it ruined the show, the drinking was part of the charm it had.