Thanks to an interview with bloody-disgusting.com, writer Mark B. Perry has confirmed that his sequel series to the original Dark Shadows, Dark Shadows: Reincarnation, is still being retooled and shopped around after ultimately not making the cut at the CW, more for scheduling reasons than anything else. He describes the premise this way: “We are present day, whatever that ends up being. Whether it’s 2022, ’23, whatever it is when we finally get on the air. But we are definitely a present day continuation. Everything that happened on the original show, mostly, is canon. As you know as a fan, canon changed within the show while it was around … The protagonist is a young woman in her twenties. In the very first minute of the pilot, she discovers that the woman that she thought was her aunt was really her biological mother, and that her biological mother was a bloodline Collins.”
As it turns out, her mother is actually Victoria Winters (played by Alexandra Moltke on the original). The search for the truth — mirroring Victoria’s quest to uncover her own mysterious past — drives this character, Tori Danvers, to Collinwood. Notes Perry, “The plan for the first season is to have a couple of legacy characters from the original show. I’m not going to tell you who they are, though! But that is the plan. That is the way the script is written, which I think provides continuity. But what’s important is, the focus of the show is going to be on the 2020s, and the next generation of the Collins family. Though it’s probably two generations by now. The focus of the show is going to be on that, but the legacy characters are crucial to the storytelling, and also to the legitimacy of the show.”
One would have to imagine that vampire Barnabas Collins will remain a significant player. For starters, being a vampire, he’s immortal. And then there’s the fact that it’s difficult to imagine DS in any form without Barnabas being at the forefront. Hopefully there will be much more to come.