Patrick Duffy and Larry Hagman dish on the new ‘Dallas'

IN THE END, says Patrick Duffy, returning to "Dallas" was like "the snapping of the fingers and you're clucking like a chicken. It's like no 20 years have gone by."

Yet before executive producer Cynthia Cidre's script lured Duffy and co-stars Larry Hagman and Linda Gray to TNT's version, Duffy said, they'd all seen some bad scripts for "Dallas" projects.

"Nobody knows why 'Dallas' was successful, what made it work, and so they tend to hang it on cliché characterizations: J.R. [Hagman] is the bad guy, Lucy [Charlene Tilton] is a tart, Bobby's [Duffy] the saint," complained the 63-year-old actor after a press conference in January.

"The scripts we read were all the tart, the bad guy and the saint. And the drunk … They never got into why is there a conflict? What drove Sue Ellen [Gray] to drink? Does J.R. think he's a bad guy, or does he actually think he's doing the right thing?" Duffy said.

"They never got beyond the cliché, which is, J.R. is the man you love to hate."

A few feet away, the man who plays the man millions once loved to hate was regaling reporters with the details of his new vegan diet, adopted at the insistence, he said, of "Miss Gray," after Hagman, 80, was diagnosed with throat cancer last year.

Sue Ellen and J.R. may be long split, but Gray and Hagman remain close, and it was she who found him the nutrition counselor and chef who oversaw his conversion from carnivore during filming in Dallas.

Would J.R. ever go vegan?

"If there was money in it, yeah," Hagman said.