Dark Shadows
Dark Shadows is an American Gothic soap opera that aired weekdays on the ABC television network from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. The show depicted the lives, loves, trials, and tribulations of the wealthy Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, where a number of supernatural occurrences take place.
Initially framed as a mixture of family saga and gothic romance, the series introduced progressively more supernatural elements during its first year, culminating in the debut of the vampire Barnabas Collins, who quickly became Dark Shadows breakout character and main protagonist. The show would go on to feature ghosts, werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and parallel universes. A small company of actors each played many roles; as actors came and went, some characters were played by more than one actor. The show was distinguished by its melodramatic performances, atmospheric interiors, numerous dramatic plot twists, broad cosmos of characters, and heroic adventures. Critics and scholars have credited the series with pioneering a more nuanced characterization of supernatural creatures that had previously been depicted as one-dimensional villains or inhuman monsters, and influencing subsequent horror and paranormal-themed TV shows.
Dark Shadows developed a large teenage audience and a dedicated cult following; by 1969, it had become ABC's highest-rated daytime series. The original network run of the show amassed 1,225 episodes. The success of the series spawned a media franchise that has included two feature films, a 1991 TV remake, an unsprouted 2004 remake pilot, a 2012 film remake directed by Tim Burton, and numerous spin-off novels and comics. Since 2006, the series has continued as a range of audio dramas produced by Big Finish Productions, featuring members of the original cast including David Selby, Lara Parker, and Kathryn Leigh Scott.
TV Guides list of all-time Top Cult Shows ranked the series #19 in 2004, and #23 in 2007.
History
Creator Dan Curtis claimed he had a dream in 1965 of a mysterious young woman on a train. The following day Curtis told his wife Norma Mae Curtis of the dream and pitched the idea as a TV series to ABC. Network officials greenlit production and Curtis began hiring crew members.Art Wallace was hired to create a story from Curtis's dream sequence. Wallace wrote the story bible Shadows on the Wall, the proposed title for the show, later changed to Dark Shadows. Robert Costello was added as a line producer, and Curtis took on the creator and executive producer roles. Lela Swift, John Sedwick, and Henry Kaplan all agreed to be directors for the new series. Robert Cobert created the musical score and Sy Tomashoff designed the set.
Broadcast history
Perhaps one of ABC's first truly popular daytime series, along with the game show Let's Make a Deal, Dark Shadows found its demographic niche in teenagers coming home from school in time to watch the show at 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central, where it aired for almost all of its network run, the exception being a 15-month stretch between April 1967 and July 1968, when it aired a half-hour earlier. Originally, it was aired in black-and-white, but the show went into color starting with the episode broadcast on August 11, 1967. It became one of ABC's first daytime shows to win the rating for its timeslot, leading to the demise of NBC's original Match Game and Art Linkletter's long-running House Party on CBS, both in 1969.Dark Shadows began with a 4.1 rating in the 1965–66 TV season, tying for thirteenth place out of eighteen daytime dramas. The audience figures only improved slightly, to 4.3, in 1966–67. 1966 was a volatile year for soaps, and many ended their runs between the premiere date of Dark Shadows in June and the month of December. By that time, six months had passed, and Dark Shadows had failed to gain major traction. In June, it ranked #13 out of 18 soaps, and by December, the lower-rated offerings were gone and the show officially ranked #13 out of 13 soaps. "The show was limping along, really limping", head writer Sam Hall remembered, "and ABC said, 'We're canceling it. Unless you pick up in 26 weeks, you're finished.' had always wanted to do a vampire picture, so he decided to bring a vampire — Barnabas Collins — to the series."
File:Jonathan Frid Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows 1968.JPG|thumb|upright=0.85|Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, a 200-year-old vampire
Barnabas was introduced in April 1967. With a time slot change to 3:30 Eastern/2:30 Central, many more teenagers found the program. By May 1968, the series was still in last place, but rose to a 7.3 rating, the rough equivalent of gaining the viewership of three million households in the span of one year. Dark Shadows returned to its 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central time slot in July 1968, without losing much of its audience. One Life to Live, which was launched by ABC in July 1968 in the 3:30 slot, also sought to reach the newfound young demographic.
The series reached its peak in popularity during a storyline set in the year 1897, broadcast from March 1969. By the end of May, Dark Shadows was ABC's most popular soap opera, and by late 1969 it was reaching between 7 and 9 million viewers on any given day, and ranking 11th out of a total 15 daytime dramas in that time period.
In November 1969, the 1897 storyline came to an end. With ratings at an all-time high, the writers were under pressure to hold the audience. Fans tended to dislike the portrayal of Barnabas as the pawn of some greater power in the next storyline, known as "The Leviathans". They were more interested in the archetypes of classic horror—the vampire, the witch, the werewolf—than in off-camera suggestion. The launch of Somerset in March 1970, a much-publicized spin-off of NBC's Another World, also hurt the series considerably.
The release of the film House of Dark Shadows in September of that year is also thought to have caused TV ratings to fall, possibly due to parents, attending the film with their children, discouraging their choice of television viewing material due to the amount of blood spilled on screen. Beginning in the fall of 1970, several ABC stations across the country dropped the show due to falling viewership. Within six months, ratings dropped from 7.3 to 5.3., though the ratings improved in its final weeks. The series was canceled on April 2, 1971, and replaced the following Monday with a new version of the game show Password. The last minute of the final episode included a voiceover by actor Thayer David wrapping up many of the plotlines on the show.
The original cast reunited in 2003 for a special reunion play recorded for MPI, and in 2004 resumed production of Dark Shadows audio dramas for Big Finish. These dramas have been ongoing for 10 seasons.
Storylines
1966/7
1795
1968/9
1897
1969/70
1970 Parallel Time
1995
1840
1841 Parallel Time
Production
Casting
, a young actress with little experience, was cast in the role of Victoria Winters, an orphan who journeys to the mysterious, fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, to unravel the mysteries of her past.Veteran film star Joan Bennett was cast as Victoria's employer Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, a woman who had not left her home in over eighteen years. Stage actor Louis Edmonds was cast as Elizabeth's brother, a widower, Roger Collins. Another stage actress, Nancy Barrett, was cast as Elizabeth's headstrong daughter Carolyn Stoddard, and child actor David Henesy was cast as Roger's troubled son David Collins.
As production on the series continued, many new and mysterious characters, played by unfamiliar actors and actresses, were introduced. Two early cast changes brought stage actors David Ford and Thayer David into the ensemble. Thayer David would go on to play several villains over the course of the series. Michael Currie, as Constable Jonas Carter, was replaced by veteran actor Dana Elcar, as Sheriff George Patterson. Most of the actors played multiple characters, and those characters often returned through flashbacks, through the use of parallel timelines, or as ghosts.
Main cast
Character names noted with * indicates appearance of a counterpart in an alternate reality known as Parallel Time during episodes 969 to 1060 or 1186 to 1245.Locations
Both theatrical films, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, were shot primarily on location at the Lyndhurst estate in Tarrytown, New York. For the TV series, Essex, Connecticut was the locale used for the town of Collinsport. Among the locations sited there are the Collinsport Wharf, Main Street, and the Evans Cottage. The Griswold Inn in Essex was used for the Collinsport Inn, and the town post office was used for the Collinsport Police Station. The Collinwood stand-in mansion used for the TV series is the Carey Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, until August 2009 used by Salve Regina University. The exteriors for the "Old House," aka Collins House were filmed at Spratt Mansion, which was also located on the Lyndhurst estate; this mansion was destroyed by fire in 1969. The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in South Norwalk, Connecticut, was also used for some scenes in House of Dark Shadows. The mausoleum shots for House of Dark Shadows were filmed in the famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, not far from the Lyndhurst Mansion.All of the interiors of the TV series were shot on sound stages at various ABC-owned studios in Manhattan. The early episodes were shot at ABC Studio TV-2 at 24 West 67th Street, and the rest of the episodes were shot at the smaller ABC Studio TV-16 at 433 West 53rd Street, now demolished.