With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD, it gets harder and harder to keep up with recent shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. They might not be the 10 best episodes, but they’re the 10 episodes that’ll help you understand what the show’s all about—without having to watch the whole thing.
On the movie screen, vampires often reach the fullness of their symbolic promise. They represent the Other from a far-off place; they’re an otherwordly evil that justifies good old religious piousness; they’re a seductive proxy for forbidden desires; they’re a glimmer of the eternal in a world full of death. It’s a wildly popular and flexible formula for film. Vampires are also, by the very nature of the medium, ephemeral; with the rare exception of a franchise, a movie vampire’s story flickers in and out, then vanishes.
When it comes to television, the rules change. Theoretically, the expanded canvas allows for ever-greater depth of characterization, and the metaphors should translate with ease given so much room for exploration. But the rigors of serial storytelling mean it’s almost inevitable that at some point, the mythos will stretch past the point of holding on to the mystique, and the series will veer toward either the sublime horizon of camp or the precipice of awkwardness. The timetable varies, depending on the elasticity of the show’s premise and how close it was to either of these poles to begin with, but it’s worth noting how many of the vampire shows on this list lacked long-term staying power. The longest running? Dark Shadows, in which Barnabas Collins spent 1,245 episodes drawing himself up to full height and portenting at 40 miles an hour. (The shortest lived is Kindred: The Embraced, which made it through only eight episodes before it got the ax.)
Not that it’s stopped anyone from trying to capture a big-screen vampire on the small screen. Occasionally, there’s a smooth transition; From Dusk Till Dawn drew deeper characterization from the film’s pulpy stock characters. Some series have been largely interested in the risqué cachet of it all (anthology series The Hunger, which ran from 1997 – 2000), and others in the action, as when screenwriter David S. Goyer followed the Blade franchise to the Spike channel, where the emphasis on low-budget vampire corporate espionage left its title hero slightly adrift. Given how tricky it is to recreate the ineffable mystery or the production values of film vampires, it’s no wonder the default for many vampire series is either the metaphorically rich and inexpensive world of adolescence or the stalwart urban-fantasy procedural in some easy-to-shoot locale that’s simply teeming with supernatural activity. That’s changing with the rise of the miniseries and an increasingly cinematic value being placed on TV; on a purely aesthetic level, Penny Dreadful decimates everything else on this list. But most vampire shows don’t try to rest on aesthetics anyway; they’re now a television go-to for exploring power imbalance in relationships.
It’s an addition to a long list of metaphors and tropes that television vampires must negotiate. Two things are certain: bloodlust, and nightclubs. Other than that, the mythologies are like fingerprints, and have as many twists and turns. Depending on story needs and night-shoot budget, vampires can walk in daylight if they’re wearing a particular talisman, or if they’ve fed, or if it’s indirect light, or not at all. They must drink blood, unless they don’t have to; crosses and silver and garlic have wildly varying levels of efficacy. They appear in photos and reflections, or not in anything silver-backed, or in nothing. And though other traits are up in the air in any given canon (not many compulsive counters on this list, for example), many television vampires share a vague but undeniable compulsion to solve a crime or mystery every week. (How ubiquitous is the trend? Ask Vampire Lawyer.)
Encompassing the full spread of vampire television is an impossible task for a single piece, as is trying to create any objective rubric in an arena where greatness is often measured in conceptual audacity rather than stylish execution. And so this list, which encompasses over half a century of vampire television and uses only one episode from any given show, aims instead to explore the elasticity of the vampire in a television framework—as metaphor for any number of social and political status quos, as characters with devoted fan bases, and as their own self-sustaining theme of trying to escape the past. And though pop culture seems to be constantly tackling the debate of whether “vampires are over,” this is one walking metaphor the small screen is never giving up; there’s always room for one more to rise from the grave.
Dark Shadows, Episode 291 (1967): Though the supernatural soap was… deliberately paced, Dark Shadows found success by embracing the Full Gothic: tremulous theremin, doleful stares, and self-parody foreshadowing from vampire patriarch Barnabas Collins. The soap introduced him as an antagonist, but after he gave a wrenching monologue about the death of his first wife, Josette, Barnabas began a trajectory out of villainhood. However, the show lacked a proper foil for him until the appearance of Dr. Julia Hoffman, who knew exactly what Barnabas was up to—and who he was. In episode 291, Julia convinces Barnabas to let her experiment on him to reverse his curse—a flash of understanding and a hope of escaping immortal inertia. It’s the beginning of a loaded vampire-human friendship that moves from twisted proxy family to a devoted standing flirtation. This dynamic would become familiar in TV series in the following decades, though perhaps few have been as gleefully amoral as these two.
“Dracula,” TV play from anthology series Mystery And Imagination (1968): Proof that some things are best when finite (sorry, NBC). It’s a staged production by nature, and this solidly produced adaptation makes several major tweaks trying to the whole affair to under two hours—Jonathan Harker takes up the narrative duties of Renfield, among others. But for its central character, it sticks to the Bram Stoker basics: herein lies a vampire happy just to be himself. Interestingly, Lucy and Mina’s friendship is positioned so centrally that it’s undead Lucy who first seduces Mina into the bite. (Perhaps to undercut these Sapphic overtures, the movie also includes scenes of an ecstatic Lucy being bitten by Dracula, so overtly sexual they must have just barely skirted Standards And Practices.) And whenever the show takes advantage of the medium—like a location shoot that provides a languorous tracking shot of Lucy walking past the bay windows of Dracula’s abandoned house—we see the visual hints of serial vampires to come, always on the move but never really at home.
Angel, “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” (season two, episode two, 2000): Angel began in the shadow of Buffy, and its first season felt duly self-conscious. But the ongoing exploration of Angel’s past highlighted a more measured arc than other TV-vamp origin stories. “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is one of the series’ finest, as Angel’s stay at the Hyperion Hotel in 1952 is touched by McCarthyism, homophobia, and racism (most poignantly through Judy, a young woman who stole from her bosses after she was fired for passing). You hardly need the demon—which of course is the point. And the greatest achievement of “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is how deftly it illustrates the everyday grind of being immortal; social mores that consume the humans living through a particular era are just so many arbitrary blips for a vampire. Within that framework, detachment seems inevitable, and the episode’s bittersweet ending leans on how much Angel’s changed, to think that humans matter after all.
