The Most Beloved Vampire TV Show Of All Time Getting Rebooted This Year? Former Star Reveals The Plan
Dark Shadows alum Kathryn Leigh says she thinks there's a good chance a new Dark Shadows series will premiere soon.
After ending its original run over half a century ago, the gothic daytime soap opera Dark Shadows may very well be coming back according to Kathryn Leigh, who played Maggie Evans — the main squeeze of the vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid). In an interview with Soaps.com, Leigh says there’s a “very good chance” the series could be resuscitated under the guidance of producer Mark B. Perry. A former producer for series like Law & Order, The Wonder Years, and Party of Five, Perry has developed the new series and is reportedly in the process of shopping it around to streaming networks.
The Dark Shadows alum told Soaps.com:
Some of you may know him, he’s had a wonderful career in television, but he has written a new series and they’re shopping it. I think that there is… well, there’s a very good chance it could get picked up this year. It would be on one of the streaming networks.”
-Kathryn Leigh
This wouldn’t be the first time an attempt was made to bring Dark Shadows back to the pop culture foreground. There was a short-lived revival series in 1991 that starred, among others, a much younger (10 years old) Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In 2004 a pilot for The WB never got picked up.
Then of course there was Tim Burton’s 2012 Dark Shadows film starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Helena Bonham Carter. The film was torn apart by critics and underperformed at the box office, leaving the possibility of any sequels highly in doubt.
Leigh notes that one thing that Perry has going for him now is that he won’t suffer from the same kind of content restrictions that the original Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis had to navigate. The first series aired on ABC between 1966 and 1971, meaning your average episode of Stranger Things or even a comedy like What We Do in the Shadows has miles and miles more latitude than that earlier series did.
Mark B. Perry, who Leigh says is championing the attempt for this new revival, previously tried to get Dark Shadows: Reincarnation off the ground at The CW. After it died on the vine, the producer reportedly didn’t give up on the project, as Leigh’s story seems to confirm. Perry had previously likened his plans to how Star Trek: The Next Generation continued the story of that franchise, so that could mean the series he’s shopping around isn’t a remake or a reboot, but a continuation of the original story.
It will be interesting to see how the streaming networks respond to Perry’s Dark Shadows pitches. On one hand, horror has never seemed more popular than it is these days. On the other, the notion of a supernatural soap opera isn’t quite as novel now as it was in the mid-1960s.
Not to mention that with AMC’s Interview with the Vampire series, Dark Shadows could have some stiff competition.
