This paper analyzes the ways in which members of different ethnic groups decode the worldwide hit television program Dallas, and suggests answers to the question of how such a quintessentially American cultural product crosses cultural and linguistics frontiers so easily. The program was studied with the intent of observing the mechanisms through which people understand, interpret, and evaluate a program; to compare such understandings across cultures; and to determine how American programs manage to engage and enter the lives of widely different kinds of viewers. Groups of six persons--three couples, all friends, meeting in the home of one of them--were drawn from four ethnic communities in Israel and one non-ethnic group of Americans in Los Angeles to discuss an episode of Dallas immediately after seeing it on the air. Based both on the literature and on the reactions of these viewers, discussion of ways in which Dallas invites viewer involvement considers parallels between the soap opera and the story of Genesis as well as the operation of seriality at both the semantic and the metalinguistic levels. It is concluded that Dallas offers viewers at different levels and in different cultures something they can understand from within themselves--not just an elementary understanding of the story as a drama of human relationships, but different types of understanding that are related to different types of involvement; and that the multiple levels of understanding and involvement of such programs offer a wide variety of different projects and games to different types of viewers. (13 references) (CGD)