Barnabas Collins & The 1,225 Episode Crush

I’m secretly in love with a fictitious 1960s Soap Opera vampire. His name is Barnabas Collins. Don’t tell anybody.

Many, if not most of us, have had starter marriages. They’re the unintentional mistakes we make so we can understand what love is. I wasn’t ready for marriage the first time around. I dated fast and said yes without thinking. A year later, when I was healing from my only divorce and in the middle of a great depression, I read an article about an old 1960’s soap opera called Dark Shadows. Starter marriages are fodder for soap operas. And newly divorced depressed women are the perfect fans of soap operas. I needed someone to take my mind off of things, and that someone ended up being Jonathan Frid’s deliciously scene-stealing Barnabas Collins.

I love a good guilty pleasure binge, whether it’s in the form of a book series or a weekend on the couch watching Netflix. I watched a few episodes, here and there, of some classic soaps with my grandmother while growing up, but I wouldn’t say I binge-watched The Young and The Restless. Dark Shadows takes guilty pleasure to a whole new level. You don’t binge-watch Dark Shadows. You live, eat, and breathe it.

I don’t know of a single person who is ashamed to admit watching all twenty-three MCU movies in order, or every season of Game of Thrones, or all the Star Wars films. Those are all prime examples of excellent binge-worthy entertainment. But this article is about guilty pleasures, and Dark Shadows is my guiltiest of all guilty pleasures.

There are 1,225 episodes of Dark Shadows. In total, there were six seasons. It was a soap opera about all the things that haunt us in our nightmares- werewolves, witches, ghosts, and most importantly… vampires. The show ran from June 1966 to April 1971, a little under four years before I was born. The show’s first episodes didn’t exactly catch on. But when Jonathan Frid joined the show in 1967, his character soon took center stage, and the show became a hit. Frid’s Barnabas Collins wasn’t meant to be the main character, but his portrayal of the vampire was magnetic, so much so that I ended up buying all 1225 episodes and six seasons of the show on DVD, and sat down to watch the entire show from beginning to end.

Barnabas Collins doesn’t show up until episode 211 in 1967, but when he does, it’s hard to take your eyes off of him. I never thought I’d fall in love with a 1960’s soap opera vampire, but I have to admit, I did. Dark Shadows isn’t a show you watch on a weekend. It isn’t something you can binge in a week. Even if you took a month off of work it would be impossible to eat, sleep, and finish the entire series. I ended up watching episodes of Dark Shadows almost every day for a year and still didn’t complete it. I would lock myself in my room and let the show take me away. I felt no guilt while I watched it. Nobody in my family understood how I could sit through so many episodes. Everybody wanted me to get out and take a walk. I just wanted to curl up with a blanket, eat some chocolate, and fall more in love with Barnabas Collins.

I got up to a little over a thousand episodes when the unthinkable happened: I fell in love with a real person. It was late November. I received a message from an old friend. He was the first person I had ever kissed, almost twenty years before. He was living in Arkansas and I was living in Texas. We started long-distance dating that December. I ended up marrying him a year later, on our first anniversary. We’ve been married going on eight years now. I still haven’t finished Dark Shadows. I’m sorry, Barnabas.

Falling in love with Barnabas Collins was easy. But, to paraphrase When Harry Met Sally, Barnabas Collins was supposed to be my transitional vampire. Barnabas came into my life when I needed a way to forget. I didn’t need to look for love at the moment. I needed a transitional television crush. Dark Shadows was cheesy as hell. It was melodrama at its finest. It was highly addictive. I would even say it was the crack cocaine of television soap operas. There came a time one day when I had to break the news to Barnabas that I was in love with someone else. He took it in stride, as would any vampire.

As I write this, I’m planning on finding the last episodes I’ve yet to watch so I can complete the series and find out what happened that last season. I don’t have the luxury of time on my hands anymore. I know I can’t re-watch the episodes I’ve already seen but, like any good soap opera, Dark Shadows is a show you can jump in on at any time and find yourself getting sucked in.

Get it? Sucked in. I know.

I don’t tell many people about my vampire crush. He isn’t sparkly. He isn’t particularly handsome. But there was something… some indefinable quality that made Barnabas Collins the perfect transitional soap opera vampire crush.