Dark Shadows Lives (on Amazon Prime)

I can't imagine anyone believed we'd still be talking about DARK SHADOWS in 2018. When the show debuted in on June 27, 1966, today's calendar date was a short nap away from the era of THE JETSONS. Even the writers of speculative fiction didn't often look too far beyond that eternal signpost of the year 2000, the year in which most of the young people graduating from high school in 2018 were born.

Yet, here we are. We've already carved off a not-insignificant slice of the 21st century and DARK SHADOWS is somehow still a relevant topic in our cultural dialogue ... and that conversation is continuing in ways that weren't even imagined when the series first hit the airwaves more than 50 years ago.

Last week, after months of oh so slowly adding blocks of episodes to its catalog, Amazon Prime provided the remaining pieces to its digital DARK SHADOWS offerings. For the first time ever, the show was available -- in its entirety -- streaming in America and the United Kingdom. A few media outlets stopped to acknowledge the moment, but none of them seemed aware of the show's tortured history with home video. A few writers expressed a "Holy shit, Dark Shadows has how many episodes?" attitude, but there was also a shared misunderstanding that the afterlife of DARK SHADOWS looked pretty much the same as that of STAR TREK, BATMAN and its contemporaries. And that has never been the case. If DARK SHADOWS remains relevant today, it's not because it has thrived on the traditional cycles of natural selection, but because fans have spent the better part of the last five decades fighting to keep it alive.

Unlike other classic TV shows, DARK SHADOWS hasn't been a comfortable fit for rerun programming. A lot of what he think of as "classic TV" exists because it was cheap and easy to program: filler for after-school, Saturday afternoons, those weird post-midnight blocks of television ... pretty much any place not already occupied by the local news or network programming. A series that can survive for more than 100 episodes on a network can usually find some sort of second life in syndication, followed by enshrinement on a boutique cable television channel (think "Nick at Night.") Once upon a time, home video releases for television shows used to take place at the very end of this cycle, but that milestone since moved to the front of the process, before the series even ends.

DARK SHADOWS, with it's 1,225-episode narrative, was an ill-fit for this cycle from the very beginning. Even during its peak the show was the definition of ephemera, each episode broadcast only once before presumably going into the studio vaults forever. While millions of people watched the show daily, there was no mechanism in place to let fans catch up on missed episodes or, GASP!, watch them a second time. The best you could hope for was to clip and save published episode summaries, such as the popular "The Whole True Story of Dark Shadows" which ran for years in 16 Spec magazine. The cast of the live-on-tape series got one chance to nail their lines, the audience had once chance to see an episode, and after that it was gone. Reruns were never part of the agreement.




So it's not that surprising that the first efforts to put the show into syndication during the mid 1970s weren't immediately successful. DARK SHADOWS didn't gain it's first precarious foothold on the after market until the New Jersey Network began airing DARK SHADOWS in 1983. The public broadcasting channel had just 510 of its 1,225 episodes available in its catalog at the start. “New” episodes were added as the series progressed: By the time NJN took it off the air in 1986, it had bulked up its catalog to include arcs beginning with first appearance of Barnabas Collins until the start of the “Parallel Time” storyline. (Many of these later episodes went unaired because of the cancellation, though.)

As always, this proved to be a temporary setback. Whenever DARK SHADOWS shambles out of its crypt, it does so with renewed strength and vigor. It followed the NNJ cancellation with its debut on home video and, eventually, The Sci-Fi Channel. Both of these avenues eventually brought every episode of the series to audiences for the first time, even giving people their first chance to see those murky, prehistoric episodes before the game-changing introduction of Barnabas Collins.

Home video also proved to be a different sort of challenge. The original VHS collection from MPI Home Video eventually occupied more than 250 cassettes before that medium was discontinued. While the DVD sets were more space conscious, they nevertheless remained expensive. While nobody will argue that the 2012 "coffin" set that collected every episode of the series (that's more than 450 hours of entertainment on 131 discs) was anything less than ostentatious, the original retail price of $600 was off-putting for many. While the price of the set has fallen in recent years to about $340, that's still a serious investment for a lot of folks.

For the last few years, streaming media has been the last, best hope for supporting the mammoth, toothy bulk of DARK SHADOWS and its sprawling, multi-century/multi-dimensional storyline. But even that has proven to be an up-hill battle. Back in 2012 everybody expected Netflix to be the service that would be the first to host the entire series online ... but as its priorities shifted toward original content, Netflix even struggled to keep even keep the DVD series in stock for snail mail subscribers. Blocks of episodes have appeared on Hulu and Amazon Prime for the last few years, but it wasn't until last fall that the prospect of any single service hosting DARK SHADOWS threatened to become a reality.

It happened last week, in the middle of the night when nobody was paying attention. Amazon Prime UK added the entire series to its catalog, followed a few days later in America where Prime customers finally got the remaining pieces of the series. A show that struggled to stay in syndication for a few months in 1975 was now available, in its entirety, at your fingertips. (Technically, MPI Home Video beat them all to the punch last October when it launched the streaming DARK SHADOWS media service at www.darkshadows.tv, but that website has a long way to go before it can compete with the reach of Amazon.)

When DARK SHADOWS was cancelled by ABC in 1971, there was no reason to believe it wasn't gone forever. That wasn't a circumstance that sat well with fans, though, who eventually began organizing festivals and supporting fundraising initiatives to bring the series back to the public airwaves. These people continued to rally for years behind DARK SHADOWS, helping support a series as its back catalog was re-built episode by episode until, 25 years later, technology had risen to match their passions. Today, you can watch every episode of DARK SHADOWS on your television, smart phone, PC, tablet or any other device connected to the Internet. And frankly, we're all being a little too casual about how big of a deal that really is.

Netflix to lose DARK SHADOWS in new year

UPDATE: As scheduled, DARK SHADOWS disappeared from Netflix's streaming service today. The uproar over this change seems a little disproportionate to the number of episodes that had been available. Gone from the streaming service are 160 episodes, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the entire 1,200+ run that comprise DARK SHADOWS. Hardcore fans of the series are probably shrugging their shoulders about the online controversy surrounding the change, especially for a series that's not exactly difficult to find through other avenues.

That's not to suggest there weren't benefits to having Barnabas Collins streaming on Netflix. The relatively small number of DARK SHADOWS episodes that had been available provided an easy hook for new viewers that might otherwise have been intimidated by the show's mammoth archive. It's presence on Netflix created one of the biggest and best avenues for attracting new viewers. There's been buzz around the web during the last few months about DARK SHADOWS re-runs surfacing on a boutique TV network that specializes in nostalgia programming, but that would be a huge step backwards in maintaining the show's cultural relevance. At least, in my opinion.

In the meantime, the first 200 episodes of DARK SHADOWS are still available on Hulu.

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Pay careful attention to the details in Netflix's listing for DARK SHADOWS and you'll see the show is slated to drop out of rotation come Jan. 1, 2014.

What does this mean? Netflix will lose the four collection of episodes presently streaming online. While it's possible these collections, which contain 160 episodes lifted from the first four DVD sets, are being scuttled to make room for an expansion (or, heaven forbid, the complete box set), that's a pretty unlikely scenario. News stories are circulating about Netflix's changing roster in 2014, but none of them mention adding episodes.

Nobody involved with the negotiation has said a word about the program's status on Netflix, nor do I expect them to. There's probably not much to say: If Netflix loses DARK SHADOWS for the duration of 2014 or longer, it will be because the invested parties couldn't come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

In the meantime, Hulu still has 200 episodes of DARK SHADOWS streaming online.  There's been no word whether THAT will change in 2014.

(Thanks to Will McKinley for the tip.)

Hulu expands its DARK SHADOWS library

Hulu, the on-demand streaming video site, recently expanded its library of DARK SHADOWS episodes. The site still has the first 40 episodes available for free, but is now offering the first 200 episodes to Hulu Plus subscribers. What does this mean? Not much, other that Hulu and MPI Home Video have reached some sort of mutually beneficial deal. It's not a sign that Netflix, which is presently streaming 40 episodes fewer than Hulu Plus, is about to flood the Internet with all 1,225 episodes. Netflix might get a few more episodes, or even the entire series ... then again, they might not. It's nice that Hulu has offered a few more episodes to its online customers, but it's not like DARK SHADOWS is difficult to find.

Dark Shadows: The Netflix Wars

I've been getting a lot of traffic to this site in the last few weeks about the availability of DARK SHADOWS on Netflix. More than a year ago, I wrote a short piece about how the entirety of the show was once available streaming, and then (probably around the time the complete DVD collection was released) how the selection was whittled down to a few hundred episodes.

Since then, nothing has changed. The same episodes are still streaming, and Netflix still has nothing to say on the subject. A few months ago I called Netflix to ask if the company had any plans to re-instate all or part of the series. I spoke to a very polite, very enthusiastic woman at the Netflix help desk, who gave me a stock answer: If Netflix doesn't have it, Netflix is working to get it. It didn't answer my question, but whatever.

After that, I sent an e-mail a bit higher up the food chain: Netflix's public relations arm. Here was my question:

I run a website dedicated to the television show DARK SHADOWS. Recently, I've been hit with a lot of traffic (and questions) from people interested in watching the program through your streaming service. Many of the episodes were once available, but now there are fewer than 200 of the shows +1,200 episodes now streaming. It's my understanding that this is a "licensing issue," but could I get a more specific answer about the status of original DARK SHADOWS at Netflix? I'm not asking you to renegotiate a licensing contract in a public forum, but if there are any specific details you could provide, my readers would greatly appreciate it.

That message was Feb. 7, and there has been no response. Honestly, I wasn't expecting one (or at least an answer that was helpful.) Media rights are vastly complicated, and it's understandable that a company would want to maintain a poker face during any kind of business negotiation. If they're really working to purchase the rights to stream the rest of DARK SHADOWS, it's not in their interest to look eager. That being said, if a "public relations" office doesn't respond to public requests, what is it they're doing during the workday?

This is also as good a time as any to address some concerns from readers who don't appear to know what Netflix does. The company is a paid subscription service with two major video components. The first is the "mail order" service that allows you to rent movies via snail mail. The other is a streaming service, which charges a fee to allow customers to watch movies using the Internet. The "streaming" selection, of course, is constantly in flux, and is never as strong as the catalog movies available of DVD. But there's no waiting, no risk of receiving a damaged disc and no trips to the mailbox. I mention this because some people appear to think Netflix is a free service, and it's not. The people asking for Netflix to reinstate the series are, in fact, asking for the opportunity to pay to watch DARK SHADOWS.

Dark Shadows Vs Netflix

Once upon a time, Dark Shadows was available in its entirety as part of Netflix's "On Demand" service.

And then, according to comments on the show's Netflix page, it wasn't.

All that is available right now are the episodes on the first four DVD collections, which gets you to the beginning of the 1795 story arc. If you visit the Dark Shadows page on Netflix you'll see a lot of unhappy people responding to the change. Here is a small sampling of the comments:

• "What happened to the rest of the collection? This is one of the main reason I joined in the first place. PLEASE release all the collections! When I started watching Dark Shadows, all the series were shown in the DVD section...where did they go?"
• "Where did Dark Shadows: The Beginning Collection go? And all of the others are gone now too along with Upstairs, Downstairs...What is going on??? BOOOOOOOO"
• "Was about to set down and start to watch this and realized it started with with episode210! REALLY Nutflix! That's so not cool. So I will not bother!"
• "PLEASE PUT THE REST OF THE SERIES ON INSTANT PLAY PLEASE!!!!! I NEED MORE. IT WAS JUST STARTING TO GET REALLY GOOD."

And so on. And those are just a few comments from the first of 45 pages of responses. I was too faint of hear to proceed any further.

On a related note, there is a Facebook page devoted to petitioning Netflix to make the entire series available to customers. It's titled, appropriately enough, Netflix Restore Dark Shadows In It's Entirety. Based on the comments on the Facebook page it appears Netflix let a few of the DVD collections fall away from its mail service, but those look to have been restored. I don't see why this Facebook page couldn't apply to the On Demand service, as well.

I've "Liked" it and suggest you do, too. Even if you don't have (or want) Netflix, wouldn't the world be a better place with a few more Dark Shadows fans?