Tag Archives: housewives

Episode 555: All Tied Up

August 1968, Ron Sproat, ,

“Please, take pity on me. Don’t torture me like this.”

It’s a Ron Sproat script today, which means that Vicki’s locked up and she’s not getting away any time soon. This is a bit of an obsession with Sproat, an old-school soap writer who knows that the only question worth asking is: What are we going to do tomorrow? If he can’t come up with a good answer to that question, then he stuffs a girl into a closet and keeps her there for a week.

Now, to be fair, it was Gordon Russell who actually put Vicki in stir this time; Sproat is just the guy keeping her here. But I don’t see any reason to be fair today. If life was fair, I’d have enough material to stretch this out to a full blog entry. And yet, here we are.

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Episode 528: This Tawdry Affair

July 1968, Sam Hall, , , , ,

“My dear Cassandra, how commonplace you have become, like some suburban housewife with little human worries.”

Jeff and Vicki are in the drawing room at Collinwood, just chattering away about old business. Jeff can’t figure out whether he’s Peter Bradford or not, and he grumbles that Barnabas is in love with Vicki, and he doesn’t understand why Professor Stokes thinks this Dream Curse is so dangerous. It’s a pageant of every boring B-plot we’ve been looking at for months.

Meanwhile, out in the gazebo, Nicholas Blair is entirely over it. “All the time you have wasted, Cassandra,” he says, summoning her to the gazebo. “Weeks are minutes to you.” And we fall in love with Nicholas all over again.

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Episode 504: The Ladykiller

May 1968, Ron Sproat, , , , , , ,

“It is tragic that your Greta is so deformed, for she really could play the role of Josette to perfection.”

It’s a Ron Sproat script today, which means that Carolyn’s still stuck in the root cellar, and so are we. So I’m going to invoke my executive privilege to ignore a filler episode, and talk about something else instead.

It’s time to start looking at the Dark Shadows merchandise, because this is the period where it becomes a real factor in the audience’s experience of the show. While this episode was being taped, Jonathan Frid was on a completely insane ten-city publicity tour, where he was besieged by literally thousands of screaming teenagers who were desperate to get closer to Barnabas, and the show. Recognizing that these kids have allowances, ABC started to tap into that market, with some success.

The first piece of Barnabas-related merchandise was released in May 1968, just in time for the publicity tour. It’s a 155-page book called The Curse of Collinwood, and it’s the fifth in the series of Dark Shadows-inspired romance novels published by Paperback Library. The Curse of Collinwood has a picture of Barnabas on the cover, and it sells spectacularly well.

Unfortunately, Barnabas isn’t actually in The Curse of Collinwood, which is about Vicki and therefore not worth discussing, so we’re going to talk about the next book instead.

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Episode 407: Bram Stoker’s I Love Lucy

January 1968, Ron Sproat, , , ,

“Why do you refuse to understand that something terrible may be happening?”

And now, a word from our sponsor.

“The blood!” cries the put-upon housewife, on her hands and knees. “Oh, I should have cleaned it right away! It won’t come off!”

She scrubs and scrubs, but that stubborn stain of guilt and carnage just won’t come clean.

Ladies, are you tired of the workaday drudgery of clearing away the evidence of your near-fatal gunshot wound? Have your impulsive, demonic maledictions left a waxy build-up on those hard-to-reach places that you used to call your heart and soul?

Continue reading Episode 407: Bram Stoker’s I Love Lucy →