“My sister told him, ‘make it scarier,’ so he brought in the vampire Barnabas Collins, and the ratings took off,” Cathy Curtis recalled. She urged him to run with it.Īt first, the campy series struggled in the ratings. The idea for the show - about an orphaned governess who goes to work for a wealthy family - came to him in a dream that he shared with his wife when he woke up.

Still, Curtis openly worried that he would be remembered for “Dark Shadows,” his gothic horror daytime soap that ran from 1966-71 on ABC. Though both miniseries received Emmys, the sequel brought Curtis his own, for outstanding miniseries.Īfter calling “The Winds of War” “a handsome hunk of pop entertainment,” Times television critic Howard Rosenberg declared the sequel “a monumental slab of TV” that was worth the five-year wait. “War and Remembrance” did not garner the ratings of its predecessor, but it was watched by about 40 million viewers. “The reality is, this is the end of 10 years of my life,” Curtis said when the sequel aired. Curtis compared the editing, which took two years, to being in jail. Writing the script took more than a year, location scouting took two years, and production required 21 months with filming in 10 countries. When “War and Remembrance” began airing in 1988, the 30-hour, $104-million production was the biggest, longest and most expensive project in television history.

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