Joanne Brough, a television producer who helped return the soap opera to prime-time television with such popular shows as “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest,” died February 24 of esophageal cancer at Joplin, Mo. She was 77.

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 vice president of creative affairs.

Although soap operas had long been a staple of daytime television, there had not been a successful one in primetime 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 television 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 the 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 America, she taught courses in serialized television drama and production at Joplin’s Missouri Southern State University.