Why We Hate Gerard

[Uncle Roger]

There's an implied back story that Gerard and Leticia had known each other, though it's never specified exactly when and where. I think that it would have to have been before Gerard embarked on a sailing career. Maybe a con job had gone bad and that going to sea was the quickest way out of town. I got the impression that Gerard had invited Leticia to Collinsport to help him with a new scheme.
I didn't especially like the induced erotic dreams that Gerard sent to Daphne. The dreams weren't especially erotic or all that interesting. The evil warlock obsessed with the innocent ingenue worked better with Nicholas and Maggie 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I find myself puzzling now how some of them work out. For example, Elizabeth has just received her horoscope for the remainder of the year, but how will this become "unfinished" I wonder?

As you'll see, the unfinished horoscope belongs to a character other than Liz.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I was very spooked when Gerard turned Carolyn into Leticia and using her as a helper. But when we reach 1840 proper, Leticia is shown to have had a past camaraderie with Gerard that may not have been 100% on the up and up. As the story progresses, Leticia becomes more and more suspicious of Gerard and allies herself with the Collins family. It would have worked better if 1970's Gerard had Carolyn possessed by Edith or Samantha.

One of the plans they had, had the show continued, was that once things returned to the present it was going to be revealed that Carolyn was actually the reincarnation of Leticia and possibly really did share Leticia's second site abilities. That's why the foundation for that was laid in the Summer of '70 storyline. I think that would have had great potential. But alas...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I always liked that Gerard was not sympathetic. He was a true villain, unlike one DS had really seen before.

Exactly, and I liked that aspect of the character, just as I liked it in Samantha. Some fans complain that Samantha isn't likable, but Hello!, she's not supposed to be. But at the same time Virginia Vestoff played her beautifully and I found it almost impossible to take my eyes off of her whenever she was in a scene.

[Gothick]

I LOVED Virginia Vestoff as Samantha. She was the standout in that storyline, for me.

I did think there were some good elements but there were long stretches of absolute nonsense that were hard to sit through. It was fun watching Jerry Lacy chew the scenery once more as Lamar Trask (a character named after Lara Parker's real-life name--I always wondered whose idea of a joke that was). I also liked the showdown between Julia and Angelique.

G.

[Gothick]

OH! and Christopher Pennock as Gabriel was marvelous--finally, Pennock was given a role worthy of his talents. His scenes were great fun.

G.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

OMG YES - Pennock was brilliant as Gabriel! 

I've mentioned this before, but back in the late '90s the official DS group on AOL held what they called the Brandies Awards for various aspects of DS. Voting was conducted across the entire Internet, not just AOL. And in the preliminary voting round to narrow things down to the top threes in each of the categories, the top three vote getters for favorite storyline didn't include one present day storyline - the top three were 1795, 1897, and 1840. (1795 came out on top in the final round of voting.) So, say what you will, but 1840 has many fans.

[Brandon Collins]

the top three vote getters for favorite storyline didn't include one present day storyline - the top three were 1795, 1897, and 1840. (1795 came out on top in the final round of voting.) So, say what you will, but 1840 has many fans.

Very surprised to hear this, that 1840 was in the top three. I can't say I'm surprised that any present day storylines didn't quite make it--they always seemed to suffer from not being able to continue the high of the flashbacks.

I, too, enjoyed VV as Samantha because she definitely was a presence in every scene she had. Quite frankly, they didn't have enough of her after a certain point in the storyline (didn't she leave to do a play or something?). And Pennock as Gabriel, by far, had many of the best scenes in this storyline as well. I always felt like Carolyn was going to develop some psychic type power given the hints dropped, and would have really liked to see this play out.

1840 was really a turning point for the series, I think, in the amount of potential there was to set up the show and its storylines for months to come. There was a ton of potential with 1841PT as well, for us to learn more about the backstory of the PT Collins family we saw in 1970 (assuming it was the same timeline) and build that up.

As always, talking about these things makes me wish they had continued the show. Though with some big names leaving, or requesting character changes, or whatever else was going on behind the scenes, all arrows pointed towards DS ending sooner than it really should have.

[Gothick]

I have written about this several times over the years--a long time ago, having sifted through all the evidence available to me, I came to the conclusion that DS was canceled because Dan Curtis had decided to wrap up the show.

Just my personal belief--at one point when we were discussing the final month or so of the show, somebody commented that the cancellation was announced at the March ABC board meeting. The ratings were actually going up when the announcement was made, and board members were concerned that the network was losing a very popular show.

I also think that some of the major actors were totally burnt out on doing it at that point. A more immediate motive for Curtis must have been plans in place to shoot NoDS and looking at another four to six weeks of having major actors not being available. I've always thought it was significant that the NoDS shoot started something like 1 to 2 weeks after the taping of the final DS episode.

G.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Yes, DS definitely didn't end because the network wanted it to end. Funny how that fact often gets ignored or outright misrepresented in a lot of articles about DS.

As as far as the time between taping Ep #1245 and the beginning of shooting of NoDS goes, Ep #1245 taped on March 24th and NoDS started shooting on the 29th.

[Brandon Collins]

Seems odd that Curtis would use NODS as a motivation to end the show, especially because not that many main actors were in it compared to what was built on the show at the time. With NODS filming, you would have lost David Selby, Lara Parker, James Storm, Grayson Hall, and Kate Jackson as main players. Outside of that, the other actors in NODS probably could've done double duty like some of the lesser actors from HODS did. Though, to be fair, shooting a show and a movie at the same time would have been extremely tiring for the actors I'm sure.

But, the show still would've had Joan Bennett, Louis Edmonds, Jonathan Frid, Keith Prentice, and probably could've used Thayer David, Jim Storm, Chris Pennock (these last three making up the lesser used actors from NODS).

Curtis was probably tired of doing DS and wanted to move on, but if show running was already left up to Lela Swift, what difference would it have made if the show kept going?

[Uncle Roger]

There were rumors that Diana Millay was returning to the show as Laura but I have no idea what her proposed storyline or time period would have been. I assume that a Laura centric plot would have carried the show the same way that the Angelique/Alexis story had done the previous year.
Kathy Cody and Donna Wandrey might have been involved in the story too.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Diana Millay herself has insisted several times that she was negotiating to return. And when asked who she would have played, her reply was Laura, of course. But who knows...

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Yes, DS definitely didn't end because the network wanted it to end. Funny how that fact often gets ignored or outright misrepresented in a lot of articles about DS.

And here's the most recent example where they conveniently leave out the network's reaction to the cancellation:

Why was Dark Shadows the TV show cancelled?

He's also wrong that the audience for the '91 DS never materialized because it had decent ratings, often coming in first in its time period. And it had the highest demos of the night. In fact, it was those demos that caused Warren Littlefield, the then head of NBC, to realize the error of his ways for cancelling the show and to approach DC about reviving the show as a series of movies, however, DC wouldn't have it because once you burn DC, well... But DC also had another reason: he felt DS is best as a continuing story and didn't want to do movies in which the story had to wrap up and not be continued...

[Brandon Collins]

It's interesting that so many articles say what this one said: "the ratings were no longer there." And then the other most common answer I see is the one about JF not wanting to play Barnabas anymore. I suppose its very easy to scapegoat someone rather than just saying the producers, or Curtis himself, were no longer interested in making the show any longer. And you would think it would be more well known, or at the very least worth a mention, if the network really did want to keep the show because the ratings were rising, or at least strong enough to continue.