Life's Pleasures Quote by Steve Kanaly

Ray Krebbs, as Steve Kanaly frames him, is a mess with a moral center - and that contrast is exactly the point. Kanaly’s list is almost comic in its escalation: drunkenness, attempted murder (three times), financial blunders, “various human problems.” It’s the kind of inventory that should damn a character, yet he pivots on a disarming insistence: “he didn’t have any mean bones in his body.” The intent isn’t to excuse Ray so much as to clarify the show’s emotional math. Dallas could be ruthless, a primetime cathedral built on power plays and predation, and J.R. Ewing was its high priest. Ray’s function was to prove that “good” in that universe wasn’t cleanliness or competence; it was the absence of cruelty.

Subtextually, Kanaly is defending a specific kind of masculinity that TV often punishes: the flawed man who isn’t strategic. Ray acts out, drinks, lunges at the wrong solutions - but he’s not calculating. The “mean bones” line signals something almost old-fashioned: character as temperament rather than résumé. Even the attempted killings are presented less as malice than as desperation in a pressure-cooker family system where J.R.’s manipulations make violence feel like the only language left.

Context matters: this is an actor talking about why audiences kept investing. Dallas wasn’t just about villains winning; it was about watching ordinary decency survive contact with glamour, money, and betrayal. Ray’s mistakes keep him human. His lack of meanness keeps him legible.