Dark Shadows Commentary
By Patrick McCray, MFA

A former student asked me what the appeal of DARK SHADOWS is.

DARK SHADOWS is a truly acquired taste. Depending on when you watch it, there might be nothing supernatural going on. As the series progressed, though, it got wilder and wilder into the fantasy realm. You gotta remember that it included a *heavily* supernatural element from 1967-1971. That's four years, and about 1040 half-hour episodes, NOT including the year or so that it was on the air before they introduced the main vampire. In that year, they had a ghost here or there, but it was more or less just a regular soap. But the story was told over 1245 episodes, and the authors did what soap writers do: they stretched it out.

But that still brings us back to the question: what on earth is the appeal of this show? Well, let me list some things wrong with it...

1. It's technically rough. We see boom mic shadows. We see actors forget their lines. We see plaster tombstones fall over. We see sets wobble. We see bad video effects and silly-looking stuffed bats. But the DS fan forgives these the way a parent forgives a seventh grade Thanksgiving pageant for lacking Broadway-level polish; we give A's for effort and imagination. Like the original STAR TREK, DS is a show that shines more and more when you consider how much imagination it took to stretch such a tiny budget so very, very far.

2. The writing and acting often veers into camp. True, but it's a little hard to approach vampires and werewolves like Chekhovian drama. They took it about as seriously as they could, with just enough of a sense of fun to elevate the material, without straying into our current cultural swamp of self-conscious, self-apologetic, self-referential postmodern mugging and audience-winking. And considering how much writing and acting the DS staff had to do every day on almost no rehearsal, the results are nothing short of miraculous. In a given season of an average fantasy show, you get, as a rough guesstimate, about twenty-five one-hour episodes stretched over nine months. In any given nine months of DS, you get ninety hours of programming. That's nearly four times as many hours with no more than a day to produce each one, as opposed to the two weeks each primetime episode gets in shooting and post-production. And there are no summer vacations for this bunch.

They worked 52 weeks a year, and produced two feature films without halting production once. Discounting special holidays, they did 255 episodes a year, or 127.5 hours of programming, in the time it takes BUFFY to do 25, or the time it takes THE SOPRANOS to do only a measly 13! If you had given those writers and actors the Sixties equivalent of THE SOPRANOS' budget, the year it takes THE SOPRANOS to crank out its season, and the charge of only doing 13 episodes, I promise you that DS would be of a SOPRANOS-level of quality. Conversely, I think that if David Chase or Joss Whedon had the task of telling their stories 52 weeks a year, for a half-hour a day, 5 days a week, with the small budget and single, tiny sound stage that DS producer Dan Curtis was given, the product would be no better than DARK SHADOWS.

Proof of this can be found in the half-season, DARK SHADOWS primetime revival done by NBC ten years ago. It was good. I didn't agree with all the decisions they made creatively, but it was, overall, a solid, respectable translation and update of the source material. It had the misfortune of having network standards for ratings pushed on it, and airing during the distraction of the Gulf War. Had it been syndicated, or on a smaller network like FOX, WB or UPN (the latter two in incubation at the time), I promise you that it would have run much longer. Even the critic's darling, suspense soap of the same era, TWIN PEAKS, only ran a season longer than the 1991 DS, and most of that was awash in fiscal red ink, despite the press, hype, and merchandising tie-ins. So, being on a network in prime time in 1991 was not a good era for any fantasy-soap. Considering all of that, the nighttime DS held its own as a quality show.

The original DS hosted a fine repertory of actors, who played a variety of colorful roles on the series. The lead, Jonathan Frid, held an MFA from the prestigious Yale Drama program, and was a respected Shakespearian actor. Joan Bennett was a revered matinee idol of Hollywood's golden age. Humbert Allen Astredo was a vet of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and Grayson Hall had an Oscar nomination. David Ford, Virginia Vestoff and Donna McKechnie were all Broadway actors of the Sixties. David Selby, John Karlen, and Kate Jackson would all go on to have major careers in prime time, and Louis Edmonds remained a staple of daytime drama twenty-five years after DARK SHADOWS. Having a lasting career of getting cast at that level is no easy or lucky feat. It takes talent and skill. And, interestingly, both Kathryn Leigh Scott and Mitch Ryan went on to guest star on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION -- the latter as Riker's father.

But getting the most out of the original DS takes patience, which is no small virtue to hone. You don't watch it for a great episode; you trade thirty minutes a day, five days a week for large, complex stories and a great surrogate family. Watch it for a week, and you'll wonder what the fuss is about; watch it for a month, and you'll most likely be a lifelong fan. Despite my apologizing for the sets and the rushed writing, it still was a very remarkable show. It boasted fans that included Neil Simon and Joanne Woodward, and during its run, star Jonathan Frid was invited to no less than the White House - a feat I have a vague notion Sarah Michelle Gellar has yet to match.

The show had an imagination, energy, and magic that is totally unique. And, although they cribbed from classic authors, ranging from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Henry James and H.P. Lovecraft, the writers' product was truly individual and involving. Long before Anne Rice or Joss Whedon gave us the romantic, regret-stricken, sympathetic vampire, DS created the archetype in Barnabas Collins. And, call me crazy, but I see more than a few shared traits between Quentin Collins and Han Solo. It's been established that George Lucas was a seasoned STAR TREK fan during its initial run -- he recognized an auditioning Clint Howard as "Commander Balok" from "The Corbomite Maneuver," and addressed him as such. Is it out of the question that he dug DS as well?

You can't beat a good story told with wit and imagination, both of which DS had in spades. More importantly the show featured characters who, again and again, tirelessly struggled for self-improvement. True, as with any tragedy, they were frequently undone by their own internal flaws (like any good soap), but the heroes of the show, namely Barnabas and Quentin, continued the struggle of placing the best in themselves over the worst. Pretty good role models.

So, that's what I think the big deal over DARK SHADOWS is.

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