Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows is a Gothic soap opera that originally aired weekdays on the ABC television network, from June 27, 1966 to April 2, 1971. The show was created by Dan Curtis, who tells of a dream he had in which a girl takes a long train ride to visit a large mansion. The story "bible," which was written by Art Wallace, does not mention any supernatural elements. It was considered daring (and unprecedented in daytime television) when ghosts were introduced about six months after it began.

The series became hugely popular when, a year into its run, vampire Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, appeared. In addition to vampires, Dark Shadows featured werewolves, ghosts, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel (both into the past and into the future), and a parallel universe. A small company of actors each played many roles and, as actors came and went, some characters were played by several actors. Major writers in addition to Art Wallace included Sam Hall, Gordon Russell, and Violet Welles.

Dark Shadows was distinguished by its vividly melodramatic performances, atmospheric interiors, memorable story lines and an unusually adventurous music score. Now regarded as somewhat of a camp classic, it continues to enjoy intense cult status among its followers.

Perhaps one of ABC's first truly popular daytime shows, Dark Shadows found its perfect 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 all of its network run (except for a 15-month stretch between April 1967 and July 1968, when it aired a half hour earlier). With mothers (and, sometimes, grandmothers) usually away from the television set at that time of day in order to tend to household chores such as preparing the family's dinner, the young people got control of the family set and claimed the show as a badge of the then-burgeoning youth consciousness in the culture at large.

Whatever the cultural context or audience composition of Dark Shadows, it became one of ABC's first daytime shows to actually win 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. Even the launch of a much-ballyhooed spinoff of NBC's Another World, Somerset, the following year did not hurt Dark Shadows.

By early 1971, ABC decided to cut costs by weeding out supposedly unproductive programming. Despite its relatively high station clearances for its timeslot and low production costs, Dark Shadows fell victim to the purge mainly because of its young audience, who usually did not make decisions about the purchasing of household goods and food products for the family, which were the two chief industries that bought airtime on daytime television in that era. Practically no other daytime show skewed so much under the 18–35 demographic threshold as Dark Shadows did. Furthermore, primetime shows and movies with horror or science fiction themes (e.g., Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) had been on the decline for some time, and, of course, the serial appealed heavily to fanciers of those genres, people who usually snubbed their noses at the often sentimental domestic or romantic themes that traditional soaps had relied on since their inception on radio in the 1930s. In addition and probably more decisively, the program experienced a precipitous drop in its ratings during its last two years on the air, falling from a peak of 8.4 in 1968-69 to a 5.3 in 1970-71.

So, despite many letters of protest from outraged fans, ABC cancelled the five-year-old show on April 2, 1971, and replaced it with a new version of the hit 1960s game Password. Although some highly irate viewers threatened to vocally (and possibly violently) decry the cancellation by disrupting the taping of Password at ABC's Los Angeles studios, nothing ever came of those plans. The rather abrupt ending of the series left some plot lines (such as the story of the Jennings family) unfinished, though most of the plot threads came to a happy conclusion, via a voiceover explaining future events in the final minute of the last episode.