JOANNE BROUGH / TV PRODUCER

‘Five-O’ vet revived
prime-time soaps

LOS ANGELES » Joanne Brough, a pioneering television producer who helped return the soap opera to prime-time television with such popular shows as "Dallas" and "Falcon Crest," has died of esophageal cancer. She was 77.

Brough died Feb. 24 in her native Joplin, Mo., according to her daughter, Cheryl Preston of Los Angeles.

After working for Los Angeles station KTLA-TV in the early 1960s, Brough joined CBS, where she helped develop such hit series as "Kojak," "All in the Family," "Hawaii Five-O," "MASH" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

She went to work for Lorimar in 1978, and it was there that she was executive producer of "Dallas" and "Falcon Crest." She also held the title of vice president of creative affairs.

Although soap operas had long been a staple of daytime television, there had not been a successful one in prime-time since "Peyton Place" in the mid-1960s. That changed with the 1978 debut of "Dallas," which quickly became one of the most popular shows on TV and spawned a host of imitators, including "Falcon Crest," "Dynasty" and "Knott's Landing."

Brough, meanwhile, went on to work for Lee Rich Productions in 1990, where she produced television movies and the documentary "America's Missing Children."

She moved to Indonesia in the mid-1990s to work for that nation's leading television network, RCTI. There, she created an in-house drama department and produced a soap opera similar to "Dallas" called "Dua Sisi Mata Uang" or "Two Sides of the Coin." She had completed 26 episodes when civil unrest forced her to flee the country in 1998. Before moving to Indonesia, Brough had spent two years in Singapore, creating a similar series called "Masters of the Sea."

Upon returning to the United States, she taught courses in serialized television drama and production at Joplin's Missouri Southern State University.

She is survived by her husband, Charles Henderson Brough, three children from a previous marriage, a stepdaughter and three grandchildren.