Dark Shadows review

(Originally posted on Facebook back in early January but it deserves to be on my blog too. 😊) 

My first year back on days after 7 years on nights has been wonderful. Hectic and busier than I thought, but wonderful all the same. To celebrate being back on days we decided to watch through our Dark Shadows collection again. The original series, aired 1966-1971. We don't have the first year. Our collection starts at the introduction of Barnabas Collins and runs to the end of the series. It took almost all of this year to watch it, only watching some episodes at night during the week and skipping weekends. We finished just before Christmas. I've been meaning to write my "review" for a little over a week now. The last time we watched through it was when Todd started working days again after 7 years of nights. So, it's been a while. After all, it's not like the 26 (approx) episode seasons of a weekly TV show that averages 7 seasons. It's a five-episode-a-week soap opera for nearly 5 years (episodes # 210 through #1245 in our set! ), so it takes a lot longer to re-watch and shouldn't be done too much cuz it would ruin the experience. But every time we do re-watch it we notice different things because enough time has passed to forget the finer details.

This time around I was noticing a lot of really terrible editing cuts. Dark Shadows was filmed "live on tape" which means they didn't get do-overs on their scenes unless something went terribly wrong. So, you see a lot of boom mics, cameras, teleprompters, and people running around where they shouldn't be along with botched lines, random coughing from off stage, and other noises and shadows. That's part of the fun of watching this old show. I even read that the set caught fire off camera during one scene that they did not cut away from, and if you listened, you could hear them rushing to put it out. And we did hear it this time. It made me wonder what must have happened to warrant those terrible cuts I was noticing on this pass. Probably fits of hysterical laughter or frustrated cussing.. 😂 We also noticed this time around, to great hilarity, that almost every new character brought on mispronounced Collinsport, Collinwood and sometimes even the name Collins... They all kept adding a "g" - Collingwood. Collingsport. Collings. I was amazed and stunned that every new actor got it wrong in their first episode or two. All the way through to the final year when everyone should have known what they were auditioning for by then since it had gained quite a cult following. Such a strange quirk.

We also realized exactly why the show ran out of steam this time. We all know why it caught fire. It was on its way to cancelation so they brought in a vampire for tickles and grins and he ended up becoming the tragic hero that saved the show. But why was it on the brink of cancelation in the first place? It's because it started out as a soap opera in a haunted house environment. There was some vague, spooky tension. But mostly it was standard soap fare - love affairs, blackmail, revenge. Barnabas was brought in to do a brief retelling of Dracula and was intended to be staked by the main heroine. But after the ratings popped and the fan mail started pour in, the show exploded into literary fan fiction. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Wolfman, Jekyll and Hyde. Smatterings of Edgar Allan Poe references - The Premature Burial, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart. All retold to the rhythm of prolonged soap writing. There were some original ideas too, or at least they must have been taken from more obscure supernatural stories because I've tried to research them and haven't found much. And after they worked time traveling into it, they had no limits. The pique of the series, I believe, was the 1897 Quentin Collins storyline, airing around episodes 670- 850. It had morphed from something resembling The Turn of the Screw into a Picture of Dorian Grey phase, concluding in a battle with a powerful modern mage type of character called Count Petofi who got his power from a disembodied hand. The character may have been inspired by the Count St. Germain. Everyone was at their best at this point. Writers and actors. And it stayed strong as long as the vampire was there to lead the stories.

But Jonathan Frid was tired of being the vampire in the last year. So they effectively ended the current 1971 timeline and went into an alternate 1841 timeline where Barnabas was never a vampire and Frid played Barnabas' normal, average-man, son Bramwell. They had a spooky story going on in the backdrop about a haunted room in the big house, but it was totally back burner to the love triangles, murder mysteries, and discovering the parentage of the adopted child in the family.  So, alas, it ended the same way it started as - a soap opera in a haunted house. It's true, they were running out of classic supernatural stories to remake, but losing the vampire lead character and leaning on gothic romance that wasn't much different than other soap material probably had a lot to do with its rapid decline and end.

But all in all, I liked a lot of things more this time around. I had a better sense of appreciation for the way most of the actors sold their characters and the way the writers handled them. They all had a thankless job to keep up with the break-neck pace of filming and script memorization. I wonder what we'll notice the next time we watch it through in 10 years or so..