So, this week, I discovered that Netflix is offering the 3 seasons of the original "Dark Shadows" on streaming video. Finally, the chance to return to the very beginning and learn the entire history of Barnabas and Quentin and Daphne! The first mystery, however, is who is Victoria Winters and why is she introducing every episode? Turns out that what Netflix is offering on streaming is the 1967 season, when Barnabas is introduced.. The first season (209 episodes) is only available on DVD, as are the remaining 3 seasons. They've cleverly split each season up into "collections" of 40 episodes each, making it appear that there are 4 seasons available for streaming. The six discs of season one have been added to the queue, although I may continue watching online until they start arriving.
The second mystery is not why it lasted 5 seasons, but why it lasted 5 episodes -- and I say this as someone who has been watching the second season, when presumably the bugs had been worked out. Were our standards really that much lower 45 years ago? Only about half of the 21 minutes of each episode actually advance the plot. The rest is repetition of the last few minutes of the previous episode and tedious detail that is nothing more than padding intended to stretch the story over the week's five episodes. I remember that I learned as a teen that watching it on Friday really was sufficient. That's pretty much par for the course with soaps, I think.
The shadows are indeed dark, as is the rest of the set. To say nothing of cramped and claustrophobic, and all too obviously a studio set -- a very small studio set. I laughed out loud when characters searching a cemetery have to shine a flashlight to see a body on the ground no more than 10 feet away from them. They cover the distance in two or three steps.
Someone forgets their lines in every episode, even those troopers Joan Bennett and Dennis Patrick. Barnabas Collins claims to have been born and raised in England, but has an American (or is it Canadian?) accent and no one notices, let alone questions it. Sam Evans works for hours on his portrait of Barnabas Collins, yet accomplishes nothing. It looks exactly the same as it did when he arrived. On the other hand, it completes itself before his next visit, so perhaps Sam is literally a "magical" painter.
And now you're asking, if it's so bad, why have I added the first season to our queue, and why will I continue to watch it online? Nostalgia, certainly. I rushed home from junior high school to watch it (and Star Trek, of course) every day, and Dori gave me a glow-in-the-dark Barnabas Collins figure kit (that was as much action as we got from figures in those days); I have no idea what happened to it. I'll bet it would be worth a tidy sum on eBay today. Curiosity about all of the episodes that I did not see as a teen. As I recall, I came into it somewhere in the 5th season with the Daphne story, which might have been Kate Jackson's first television role and was also the inspiration for my hair style of those days -- and the reason that I watched "Charlie's Angels." It's wonderfully, naturally campy.
And where else can you find vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, monsters,witches, time travel and a parallel universe, all taking place in a small town on the coast of Maine? Who knew that the New Englanders were such an active bunch, when not farming or hosting clam bakes on the beach?
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