Mitchell Ryan has died at the age of 88. There will now be a brief pause so that everyone can say who the hell was Mitchell Ryan? He was an actor that was in quite a few productions but perhaps he was best known for playing the character Burke Devlin in the soap opera Dark Shadows. He played the role for one year at which time the producers fired his ass because he drank too much. Well, that's all fine and well, but the guy who replaced him was butt-ugly terrible. Comparable to Bewitched when the first great Darrin (Dick York) was replaced by the horrible second Darrin (Dick Sargent). I am a big Dark Shadows fan, so his passing means something to me. God Bless you Mitchell. May you rest in peace.
The time is right for a true Dark Shadows reboot. Not as a movie. Not as a limited event series. Not as a weekly show with 13 episodes per season or similar crap on a UHF channel.
But as an everyday low budget daytime soap opera on ABC the way it was meant to be, with commercials selling real products such as toothpaste, cars, soap, and coffee. No insurance or pharmaceutical ads. No political ads. No goddamn weather update interruptions. No goddamed Life Alert! Shoot me!
We want, we demand, an old fashioned gothic soap opera, marketing with vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and "the severed mummified hand of glory" in a box. Melodramatic horror. Overacting. Questionable set lighting. Rushed script writing. Continuity errors. The whole ball of wax. That's what we want.
Network execs are so dense, overlooking obvious formulas like this that would still kill.
The show would automatically trend everywhere when boomers learned of a 30 minute timeslot that did not allow annoying fucking commercials pushing another drug or health insurance or bathroom remodeling yahoos who look like funeral home directors with shower stalls that look like a set location from Phantasm.
The goal would be to match the original Dark Shadows run of 1,225 episodes.
But no one has the spine, nor the balls, nor the brains, nor the patience, to do it correctly.
An old fashioned structure, but enhanced by streaming / binging alternatives.
It would be huge.
But noooooooo. Give us another mindless talk show that sucks every particle of oxygen from my atmosphere of existence.
