yes from what i understand ryan's departure was very abrupt.

it certainly wasn't planned on or written into the scripts. it's something of a coincidence that his big storyline was wrapped up shorty before he ended up leaving the series and it ended up going in an entirely different direction with a different actor playing a somewhat repositioned burke.

what's intersting to ponder is that as the show's original lead ryan probably had a long-term contract. had he not left abruptly and been replaced by an actor who only signed on short term the character of burke devlin(and various incarnations for ryan during the time travel storylines)might have been with the series for many more years.

from what i've come to understand before it became clear that barnabas was such a runaway success on the program the original intent was for burke(played by ryan)and doctor woodard to kill him after his thirteen week run. we know how that ended up being played out.

you mean his multitextured performance as mr.wells is not his best known role?

last night i rewatched the episodes that conclude the whole burke devlin revenge against the collins family storyline(around eps. 200).

for the monumental buildup this plot received(it was the program's pivotal conflict for nearly a year)it goes out with more of a whimper than a bang.

after the laura collins storyline this gets hastily wrapped up in just a few episodes.it's almost something of an afterthought.

not only does the plotline as a whole sort of fizzle but it's "big reveal" ends up not even being the pivotal point of the episode(ep. 201).

burke and sam storm collinwood and force roger to admit his guilt in the manslaughter incident but then burke essentially lets roger off the hook and vows never to mention the whole thing ever again.that's sort of it.this action only lasts about the episode's first ten minutes before the emphasis abruptly shifts the the jason mcquire plot and the cast changes.

suddenly jason,david,vicki and carolyn are driving the episode and the huge devlin scene is almost forgotten.it's also somewhat notable that this episode has a rather large number of characters(eight as opposed to the usual five/six).

anyways for all the buildup i'm always struck by how this storyline just sort of flatlines.it's just about a week before the barnabas introduction and my impression of it is that the producers knew that the show was about to be going in a radically different direction and just wanted to wrap this up as quickly as possible so that the characters' emphasis could shift.

from this moment on several characters defining qualities wiill be radically different.

i alway thought that hall's willie was sort of dirty-sexy to karlen's sad-eyed puppydog cute.

yes because the jason mcquire plot was completely removed from the 1991 series they needed to find a way to bring the willie character into collinwood and they achieved that by making him a nephew of mrs.johnson.

in that version he seems to function as something of a composit character of the original series' matthew morgan,harry johnson and willie loomis.

one of the things that gives the series it's naive charm it's that it exists as something of a world apart.

there is something of a sense of isolation.of remove.

given the tumultuous years in which it ran it's absence of references to pop cultural or current events it's somewhat remarkable.

while our friends stewed in gothic mystery in collinsport,maine a war raged on.robert kennedy and martin luther king were assassinated.the manson family waged helter skelter.stonewall happened.woodstock came and went a few miles from the studio where the program was filmed without a single nod(could we read into willie loomis's shiftlessness as draft dodging perhaps?).

so it's not surprising vietnam wasn't brought up remotely.the revolutionary was seemed like safe territory and thus was mentioned rather frequently during the 1795 sequence(wasn't the mausoleum built to store ammunitions?).however the topic of slavery must have been touchbutton as i can't recall a single mention of the civil war during the 1897 storyline.

very little of the spirit of the times crept onto the screen.as outrageous as the plots were the group was rather "square".the most "revolutionary" thing happening when carolyn and maggie dropped from minis to maxis in 1970.the closest thing we get to the counterculture generating at the time was christopher pennock's absurd "hippie" characters(a bike riding photographer and an astrologer!)in 1970.

soap operas in general...and particularly forty years ago...remained politically neutral,removed from world affairs and somewhat socially conservative(given their advertisers were primarily manufacturers of housewife friendly products like laundry detergent)and dark shadows perhaps even more so given the outlandishness of the plots.an air of respectability was essential.

but again i think that remove is what lends the series much of it's charm.

good question patti...

however not one i can answer with any certainty.

NODS is "dark shadows" in name but it's otherwise not remotely tied into the series mythology(oh,and the house is called collinwood).

yes there's a "quentin" and an "angelique" but there's also a carlotta,a tracy,a claire and an alex.there's a brief mention of an elizabeth stoddard but neither she nor the rest of the daytime collins family are part of the plot.needless to say neither is barnabas collins.

is the quentin in NODS the same quentin as his daytime counterpart?who knows.the name "quentin" seems to be a generic catchall for a david selby character(that and the muttonchops).he's named that in every single time period whether series continuity backs that up or not.

diana millay plays a character named "laura" here but there's no indication whatsover that she's a pheonix or the same person she played on the series.

so without a barnabas character it's almost impossible to say one way or another whether or not this "sarah" is the same sarah from the program.

is that vague enough for you?