Television’s first vampire series was the 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows. The tale of a young woman living in a haunted mansion limped along in the ratings until the desperate producers threw a vampire into the storyline. Barnabas Collins started as a villain but fan reaction convinced the creators to make him a tormented hero. The show ran several years, inspired two movies and was revived as a prime-time soap in 1991.
Forever Knight
In 1989, a CBS TV-movie introduced Nick Knight, a vampire atoning for the lives he’d taken by working as a homicide detective. Nick (Rick Springfield) subsisted on animal blood while hoping his friend the police coroner, could cure his condition.
Forever Knight became a series in 1992, with Geraint Wyn Davies in the lead and the coroner recast as a woman with a romantic interest in Nick. After three seasons, she convinced him to turn her into a vampire but died in the process; grief-stricken, Nick convinced his mentor, LaCroix, to stake Nick and put him out of his misery.
Dracula: The Series
This syndicated 1990 show pitted the descendants of the Van Helsings against Dracula, who now advanced his agenda through the power of a multinational corporation. It lasted one season.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
Buffy, a 1997 series, starred Sarah Michelle Gellar as a woman gifted with heightened strength and speed in order to defend humanity against vampires. That didn’t stop her from falling in love with Angel, a vampire who’d regained his soul and was tormented by his past crimes. Angel eventually spun off into his own series.
Vampire High
A 2001 series about a school where human teens study by day and the vampires study by night. Trouble ensues.
Moonlight
This 2007 series looked a lot like Forever Knight, with a vampire hero working as a private detective, subsisting on animal blood and having an uneasy romance with a mortal woman.
True Blood
This 2008 HBO series has vampires come “out of the coffin” and win their legal rights as American citizens, using the blood substitute “true blood” to satisfy their urges. In a backwoods Louisiana town, waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) falls for a vampire, which makes her the target for a serial killer murdering “fang bangers,” girls who have sex with the undead.
The series is based on a series of novels by Charlaine Harris
Cartoon Vampires
1980 introduced Dracula to Saturday morning cartoons in Drak Pack, in which he directed a crime-fighting team descended from himself, Wolfman and Frankenstein’s monster against evil Dr. Dred and his crime cartel O.G.R.E.
Van-Pires hit syndication in 1997, telling the story of Tracula and his band of evil intelligent vehicles seeking to drain gasoline from human cars.
