Every episode begins with a long shot of the same big house. “My name is Victoria Winters,” intones an actress, delivery meditative or unemotional depending on your point of view. Victoria Winters briefly reflects on her life in ornate Gothic-tinged language. And the show begins.
Dark Shadows, a daytime drama ran from 1966 to 1971, over 1200 episodes. I’ve watched almost 90. It’s tedious, if not frustrating. The plot moves at the speed of glaciers; characters and setting have promise, but don’t develop; the show doesn’t seem to know what it’s about. Yet I’m engaged.
I started watching the show, available in its entirety on Tubi, because I was curious. I knew that after more than 200 episodes it introduced its most famous character, a vampire named Barnabas Collins. And that plots grew weirder from there, incorporating werewolves, time travel, mad scientists.
Dark Shadows ran at a time when there were only three commercial American TV networks, meaning it was widely seen almost by default—one figure suggests around eight million viewers per episode at its height. It’s not talked about much these days, but its influence seems to be visible in later genre works.
Collins enters the show looking for a living woman who may be the reincarnation of his centuries-dead love, a plot point that turns up in Blacula and the Dungeons and Dragons module Ravenloft and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A mysterious woman turns out to be the incarnation of the mythical phoenix, which looks a little like a famous storyline in Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics—and Claremont wrote about Dark Shadows for Marvel’s monster magazines in the 1970s.
The idea of the show was intriguing; what else might be in there? I just wasn’t prepared for how slow it starts. The series opens with a woman (Alexandra Moltke) on her way to a small town in Maine, hired as governess to the son of the town’s richest family, and hoping to find answers about mysteries of her past. But also arriving in Collinsport is a man (Mitchell Ryan) with a long-held grudge, determined to put in motion a plan for revenge.
It looks like a gothic mystery, filled with characters named like “Victoria Winters” and “Burke Devlin.” But the melodrama fades; you wait for something to happen, and nothing does.
Devlin, who wants revenge on the wealthy Collins clan who wronged him years before, merely aims to buy their house and business. Victoria’s background is never resolved; the creators started off with one idea, thought of a better one after production began, and never get around to putting that idea on screen. There’s an attempted murder, soon forgotten, and then a murder, which inspires much mutual suspicion and little action.
We do glimpse a couple of ghosts, and Victoria spends a few episodes locked up in a disused room of the sprawling Collins mansion. Most of the screen time of these episodes, though, is devoted to bland romantic subplots: rich Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) has set her cap for Devlin while she toys with the affections of ambitious young fisherman Joe Haskell (Joel Crothers), himself the heart’s desire of café waitress Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), whose father Sam (Mark Allen for a few episodes, then recast with David Ford) conspired with Carolyn’s uncle Roger (Louis Edmonds) to frame Devlin years ago.
That’s a promising set-up in its way. But nothing much happens over the more than 30 hours I’ve watched. Devlin doesn’t use Carolyn’s affections to get back at her family. Victoria gets out of the locked room unhurt. The Carolyn-Joe-Maggie triangle comes right out of Archie comics—flirtatious rich girl, good-hearted small-town girl, the everyman torn between them—but has less development.
Fascinating in its dullness, the show has nice moments, as when Roger Collins finds his way through a cobwebbed secret passage. But mostly it struggles to build a gothic atmosphere on a daily TV show’s resources. Actors slightly flub lines. Cameras are positioned wrongly, showing the edge of a set. Stagehands are visible crouching behind furniture. Somebody coughs or drops something offstage and you hear it on the soundtrack.
That’s part of what’s interesting. Craft becomes visible through errors you usually don’t see. Framing isn't always thought-through. Actors miss their marks. Lights cast shadows in the wrong places. You also notice the limits of 1960s network TV. Nobody swears, sex is subtextual at most, and in 90 episodes there’s yet to be a non-white actor or extra that I’ve noticed. (On the other hand, one of the extras who has briefly appeared on the show was a young Havey Keitel.)
In fairness to the creators, I’m not experiencing the show the way they intended. They had to assume viewers would miss episodes. So the show must slow down to repeat its plot points. Minor inconsistencies, like how many rooms are in the Collins mansion or when it was built, proliferate; and who cares?
Somehow the illusion of the story doesn’t quite break. The slow pace and the network constraints are offset by good professional acting—melodramatic, but playing for emotional subtext. The performers understand the relationships of the characters and how they relate in a scene, and that’s engaging. They care, so we care. Not always, but more often than you’d think.
The show works because of that, but even more because of its potential. It feels like it could turn into something interesting at any moment. Having read up on what’s coming, I know it eventually becomes more lively. So far, I’m just invested enough to want to see it get there.
