Another Way to Re-Boot DS

[Zahir]

Forgive the wild speculation if you will, but it is what I do.   

I was watching an episode of the new Doctor Who this week, and it suddenly occurred to me that such is an excellent model for bringing Dark Shadows back to television!

For those of you who don't know, Doctor Who was a very popular science fiction show in England that ran from 1963 until about 1987.  It was all about this mysterious stranger known only as "The Doctor" who has a time/space machine which he uses to explore all of creation.  Although he looks human, The Doctor is in fact from the planet Gallifrey but Earth is his home-away-from-home and his companions are usually from some period in this planet's history.  Since the premise was The Doctor's race could "regenerate" if wounded sufficiently, in effect becoming an almost entirely new person, they were able to have seven actors play the central character during its more than two-decade run.

The show retained a huge cult following for the years and years after it ceased production.  In fact Big Finish makes and continues to produce episodes of DW in audio format, starring several different 'Doctors' depending upon when the stories are supposed to take place.

And then--BBC wanted Russell T. Davies desperately to come to work for them after multiple huge hits.  He agreed but the project he wanted was to re-boot DW!  Its fifth new season should air sometime next year.

What he did was change several details to "update" the series.  Davies imagined that the Doctor's people had perished in a terrible war with the biggest villains of the series, the cybernetic Daleks.  Thus the Doctor is the last of his kind (kinda/sorta).  Instead of multiple half-hour episodes forming one story, the new DW has hour-long shows that are usually self-contained but follow a season-long "arc."  The story-telling took on a more mature form, including feelings of romance between lead characters and delving more into moral ambiguity.  Previous enemies re-appeared as well as new recurring characters and races that in general proved very popular.

Now...imagine how this could be done for Dark Shadows!