Shark Bytes

The Bramwell episodes put a stake in the series. Dull is a understatement.

If you can get through the leviathan sequence, you will find that the show actually got better, generally, until the 1841 parallel time story, which completely ditches Barnabas and company. The one exception is that stretch in 1970 Parallel time where Barnabas is chained in his coffin. During that period, the creators were actually working on the film "House of Dark Shadows", and that necesitated a majority of the cast to be left out of the storyline so they too could work on the film. And one of the series' crowning storylines, the flashback to 1840, has been criminally underrated. It features some of the best stories and acting (particularly by Jonathan Frid, David Selby, and John Karlen) in the entire series. And despite my earlier comments, 1841 Parallel time is not unwatchable. It just pales in comparison to most of what had preceded it.

I watched the show after school when I was in elementary school.
Rediscovered it when it came out on DVD. Having lots of episodes to watch got me thru weeks of being bedridden with pneumonia.
I have enjoyed all of DS except the stupid Leviathon storyline. It dragged on and on. And Angelique was not in most of it and she was missed as she is always entertaining.

I actually made it through the Leviathans okay, but Parallel Time is putting me to sleep...zzzzzz...

Angelique/Cassandra more than meets her match when Nicholas Blaire enters the picture.

One of teh first TV shows I ever remember seeing - I've been renting them on Netflix for awhile now but am only up to the Adam storyline. As to be expected with soap operas, there are so many dropped storylines and several others that have holes in them that are big enough you could drive a Hummer through them. The show lost its focus with Victoria in search of her past, then she becomes increasingly irrelevant after the 1795 story arc ends.We never get the admission that we all know is the case - she is Elizabeth Stoddard's daughter.
What is annoying me right now is Angelique - the writers made her too powerful, she doesn't have a counterbalance to her spells or the dream curse. Even when Sam Evans paints her portrait as a hag she makes him blind. She just bulldozes over everyone. But what also is jarring to me is (I've also started renting the pre-Barnabus episodes simultaneously) is how the Collins family was originally written much "darker" (pardon the pun)and menacing (David was a Bad Seed at first) but when the show shifts to the Supernatural, they are written more sympathetically. The sense of time from episode to episode is also dodgy at best, with characters dropping out of sight for weeks. As far as acting, Frid has great presence but stumbles a lot.Katherine Leigh Scott shows good range. Grayson Hall is a gay man's camp dream and Joe Haskell was hot. The guy who played Willie Loomis did a great job and it is too funny to see everyone flub their lines, drop props, stand in shot at the wrong time, hear offstage sneezes and coughs, etc.Despite its blemishes, a series worth a following.

Casey,

I respectfully disagree with your argument that watching "unrealistic" fiction on a daily basis is somehow bad for you. I would submit that it is actually *good* for you in that it allows for a release of tension and stress that builds up in our daily lives. People often need a break from reality in order to let their bodies and their minds rest a bit. A daily dose of some unreality is very healthy for us.

Screw Buzz the motorcycle bum. If anyone thought plots like that made "Dark Shadows" they are sadly mistaken. Great stories like the epic 1897 flashback with Count Petofi gave "Dark Shadows" its highest ratings!

Windom, the DS books are actually full of errors (read some of the customer postings at amazon.com for those Pomegranate Press books). The show was just hitting its ratings stride as they got deeper into Barnabas eps and it would have been better to have had some realistic subplots thrown into the show for the entire series run (along with the farfetched ones)it would have been even better worth viewer's time had they continued the trend they had instead of getting absoluteluy unlike reality!

DJ, I'm truly very sorry to read about your being bedridden! Have a nice day!

I'm the poster who wrote that "nothing to do with reality" bit and I further say this. This show was not usually say anything like, say, Mash which had a lot to do with reallife american conflicts(even running documentary footage in a few eps) while still being entertaining, so it isn't essential to make your show irrelevant just to be entertaining. There is such a thing as pure escapism yes, but to keep having it on such a daily basis is not good as it gets one too engrossed in many things that bear no relation to reallife. It's better to watch say the 1979 Dracula film starring Frank Langella and Kate Nelligan a couple of times than most of the hundreds of irrelevant Barnabas DS eps. There was a good reason why movies around 1968 (tv following soon afterward) turned so realistic and topical. Dark Shadows staying with such pure escapism was not good--you know just before Frid first arrived the character of Willy Loomis (John Karlen) is heard talking about beatniks to Mrs. Johnson (Clarice Blackburn) and I swear in a really pre-Barn ep there is an instrumental Beatles music song playing at the Blue Whale jukebox. So until Buzz the motorcyclist (himself a somewhat realistic-topical character) disappeared DS was actually a bit topical and sometimes far more related to reality. Later in the Quentin Collins eps the show was totally unrelated to reallife--not good on a daily basis to watch!

PS Kate Nelligan (born 1950) very possibly would have been good on Dark Shadows as many a lady character in the bad-no-reality Quentin eps.

They obviously ran out of ideas after the original Quenten storyline ran out. It wasnt very good after that.

DJ, I couldn't agree more with your post about the dismal Leviathan story. I also agree that Thayer David was probably one of the best actors on the series (if not the best!). I think Prof. Stokes was in only about four episodes of the entire cruddy Leviathan story!

I just read a comment from someone who said the show was terrible because it had "nothing whatsoever to do with reality." Gee, ya think? What was she looking for, The News Hour with Johnathan Frid? It's about escaping reality. The show was wonderful for that, even though there were amusing little tugs on the reality line from time to time, like coughing technicians, window blinds falling down, entire walls threatening to do likewise, characters who are supposed to be dead pointing and squirming around because they don't realize they're still on camera, and, once in a while, cameras nearly running into each other in plain sight of the audience. We'd giggle (sometimes we'd laugh ourselves sick) and push it out of our minds so we could get back to 1897 or 1840 or wherever they were taking us that day.

I recently did an E-Bay buy-a-thon, eventually picking up the entire series. Over 1,200 episodes. Wow. I'm disabled and bedridden, and since there's not much else to do I sometimes have my own private Dark Shadows marathons.

Guess what...

I couldn't finish the Leviathon storyline. I tried, because I wanted to know what was happening with the secondary story (about Quentin and Charles Delaware Tate), but I couldn't do it. I finally had to use one of the episode guides online to read my way past the rest of the Leviathan BS. The story was stupid, it was impossible to care about developments, and the only tension was negative tension care of "Megan's" horrible "scream-and-hyperventilate" acting style, which kind of worked as Quentin's insane ex-wife in 1897 but did NOT work during these Leviathan nightmares. It was also during this storyline that Maggie was reduced to a Meganesque whine queen, which broke my heart even as an amorously-minded little ten year old. In fact, just about everyone lost twenty points of acting IQ during this period. Julia Hoffman's stutter-style became distracting as she added the constantly blinking, fan-length eyelashes and the "deer in the headlights" stare that never seemed to leave her face (possibly a reaction to the crap they were making her read), and the best actor in the entire company, Thayer David (Professor Stokes) was completely wasted and given little to do. Hey, it's gotta be bad for me to decide to never watch a DVD I just spent forty bucks on so I could skip past the whole dismal affair.

Which is where I am now, and from several posts I've read here I fear I'm not going to get much relief for a while. It just makes me want to rewind to 1795 or 1897 and watch some great escapist TV again.

So just when IS Harry Johnson going to come out of his room, anyway?

I really liked that Cockney tune "I Wanna Dance With You" by Pansy Faye (Charity Trask). The 1897 period on Dark Shadows was the GREATEST.