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    ‘Barbenheimer,’ and an Early Start, Boost Oscar Ratings to 4-Year High

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    ABC’s telecast of the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday drew 19.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.The comeback of live event TV continues.ABC’s telecast of the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday drew 19.5 million viewers, hitting a four-year viewership high, according to Nielsen. The live TV audience was up from last year’s 18.8 million, the third consecutive year that Oscar viewership has grown.The ratings report will prompt cheers at ABC and the academy, which bumped the start of the venerable awards ceremony to 7 p.m. Eastern, an hour earlier than usual, in the hopes that more viewers would stick around through the final categories.That approach appeared to pay dividends, as did the numerous nominations for the big box office hits “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — a change from recent years when more obscure films dominated the ceremony. Jimmy Kimmel also received warm reviews in his fourth outing as host, leaving him one away from matching another late-night star who moonlighted at the Oscars, Johnny Carson.Nielsen said that Sunday’s Oscars were the most-watched network awards show since February 2020, extending a recent trend where viewer interest has perked up for the kind of mass cultural events that struggled during the pandemic.In February, 16.9 million people watched the Grammy Awards, a 34 percent increase from last year. Viewership of the Golden Globes in January rose 50 percent compared with a year ago. The Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers beat ratings records with an audience of 123.7 million. Even ratings for the 2023 Tony Awards, traditionally the least-viewed of the “EGOT” quartet, rose modestly.At Sunday’s Oscars, Billie Eilish sang her pop ballad “What Am I Made For?” and Ryan Gosling delivered a cheeky yet dedicated performance of “I’m Just Ken.” The choreography, which drew on Busby Berkeley films and the Marilyn Monroe musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” was complemented by a cameo by the thrash-rock guitarist Slash and a bevy of supporting Kens from “Barbie,” including Simu Liu.ABC, which has the broadcast rights to the Oscars through 2028, said that it had sold out its advertising inventory for Sunday’s event. The network did not share prices, but advertising executives said ABC had charged $1.7 million to $2.2 million for a 30-second spot, up slightly from last year. Some of the ads turned up in the broadcast itself, like a plug for Don Julio tequila, in which Guillermo Rodriguez, a Kimmel sidekick, offered the beverage to celebrities in the audience.In 2021, for a stripped-down pandemic Oscars held in a Los Angeles train station, only 10.4 million people tuned in. Viewership rose in 2022 to 16.6 million people, in part because of the bizarre spectacle of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.Still, there is no question that TV viewing habits have changed. Before 2018, the Oscars telecast had never dropped below 32 million viewers. More

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      Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite

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      Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Free to Be … You and Me’ Took the Revolution to the Playground

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      Fifty years ago, the TV landmark showed Gen X kids that no one else has the right to tell you who you are.“Free to Be … You and Me,” the 1974 kids-TV special and feminist milestone, begins with footage of children riding a carousel. I was one of them. Not literally — I watched the show on TV like millions of other baby Gen X-ers. But these kids, laughing and spinning, were my cohort at a strange point in history.We were born at the tail end of one of the country’s great periods of social revolution. Our mothers were getting jobs outside the home, and so was Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Later in our childhoods would come the era of Phyllis Schlafly and He-Man, and things would jerk backward again for a while, maybe without our even being aware of it at the time.But on “Free to Be,” the future was baby steps away. The theme song, by the New Seekers, imagines a land “where the children are free” and says that “it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” The children transform into cartoons on lively horses. They leap out of the spinning wheel’s orbit, galloping through an animated desert, girls and boys side by side.In the show’s animated stories, chivalry doesn’t protect girls, self-reliance does: In “Ladies First,” a “tender, sweet young thing” who insists on special treatment ends up eaten by tigers.ABCMarlo Thomas, the former star of the sitcom “That Girl,” created “Free to Be” as an album in 1972, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was inspired, she said in the introduction to a 2010 DVD of the TV special, by reading bedtime stories to her niece — books that “told girls and boys who they should be, who they ought to be, but seldom who they could be.”Through songs, skits and stories, “Free to Be” told them they could be, and do, anything. Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Watch the Oscars: Date, Time and Streaming

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      An earlier airtime and an unusual presenter approach are among the changes at this year’s ceremony.Watching the Oscars doesn’t usually require an instruction manual.But this year, to make sure you catch the goodness of Ryan Gosling performing “I’m Just Ken” — in what we can only hope will be a faux fur coat — there are two crucial steps you must take.One: Be in your preferred watching position — popcorn popped, possibly in a “Dune” bucket, Snuggie on — an hour earlier on Sunday. In a break from the traditional 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific start, this year’s ceremony is scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m., an effort by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stick to prime-time hours.And two: When we say 7 p.m., we mean what-was-until-2-a.m.-on-Sunday 6 p.m., because — that’s right — daylight saving time is here once again. Don’t forget to set your clocks — if you still have clocks — forward an hour.You may have heard that “Oppenheimer,” with a pack-leading 13 nominations, is a lock to win best picture. This is accurate. But even if we’re certain how the night will end, the getting there is the fun part. Here’s everything you need to know.What time does the show start and where can I watch?In a perk for those who like going to bed early, this year’s show begins at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Sunday is also the start of daylight saving time, so remember to set your clocks an hour forward before you go to bed on Saturday night.On TV, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, you can watch the show live on the ABC app, which is free to download, or at abc.com, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Abbott Elementary’ Teaches Reading, Writing and Roll Camera

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      Each season of the ABC sitcom employs about 150 children. Its core curriculum: schooling Hollywood in what a show with child actors can be.Willis Kwakye has attended the same school since 2021. He’s 13 now, an eighth grader, a veteran, someone who knows his way around the classrooms and the cafeteria. And sometimes, when he’s in his uniform with a math worksheet in front of him, “I can even think it’s real school for a little bit,” he said.His classmate Arianna White, also 13, knew just what he meant. “It feels a lot like school, except we’re just filming and there’s a lot of cuts,” she said.Kwakye and White were speaking, via video call, from a classroom on the set of “Abbott Elementary.” (They were in one of the real classrooms, where child actors complete their mandated three hours of instruction per work day.) The Emmy-winning ABC sitcom mockumentary has recently matriculated for a third season and already been renewed for a fourth. Set in a fictional K-8 school in Philadelphia — though actually filmed in Los Angeles — it requires the presence of about 150 school-age children each season.In any given episode, those kids can be seen raising their hands in class, scurrying past each other in the hallways, giggling at their teachers’ antics. But “Abbott Elementary” diverges from most scripted series involving children in two significant ways: The show uses its child actors sparingly, giving them a handful of lines per episode and only requiring their presence one or two days each week. And for the most part, it lets them be kids.“Having kids just be themselves actually looks really good in our world,” Quinta Brunson, the series creator and star, said in a recent phone interview.Willis Kwakye, center, in an episode of “Abbott Elementary.” Tyler James Williams, a star of the show, said, “Part of being a child actor comes with a certain amount of trauma,” and “Abbott” aims to avoid that.Gilles Mingasson/ABCWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Happy Days’ Got Us Unstuck in Time

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      Mention “Happy Days” to TV viewers of a certain age (raises hand) and the first thing they remember might be not an episode or a scene or a catchphrase but a lunchbox. I’m specifically thinking of a cool Thermos-brand one — featuring Henry Winkler as the show’s pop-phenom greaser, Arthur Fonzarelli, a.k.a. Fonzie, a.k.a. the Fonz — which luckier ’70s kids than I got to schlep their PBJs to school in and which is now in the collection of the Smithsonian.To remember “Happy Days” is to remember your youth, which was also the function of “Happy Days” when it premiered in 1974. Well, at least it sort of was. Ostensibly the show appealed to grown-ups who were young during its time period — roughly, the mid-50s to mid-60s, over 11 seasons. But some of its most ardent fans were the lunchbox-toters toddling down someone else’s memory lane.Now “Happy Days” is 50 years old. Or is it? Time gets fuzzy when you enter the “Happy Days”-verse. In some ways the series never ended; it was just handed down through the culture like a vintage varsity jacket. It was repurposed as a nostalgia object by the Spike Jonze video for Weezer’s 1994 single “Buddy Holly.” In 1998, “That ’70s Show” set its own reverie, like “Happy Days,” among a gang of teenage friends in Wisconsin. Last year, that series’s sequel, “That ’90s Show,” created a ’90s version of the ’70s version of the ’50s.If all this math is too much, all you need to know is that there are only ever two periods in pop-culture nostalgia. There is Then (simple, innocent, fun), and there is Now (scary, corrupt, confusing). Eventually, Now becomes another Now’s Then, and the cycle repeats. “Happy Days” was nostalgic because the teenagers weren’t smoking weed. “That ’70s Show” was nostalgic because the teenagers were smoking weed. We rock around the clock and around the calendar, returning ever again to the beginning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Happy Days’ Cast Looks Back on 50th Anniversary of Hit Show’s Premiere

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      In an interview, the surviving members of the original cast — Ron Howard, Donny Most, Anson Williams, Henry Winkler and Marion Ross — look back on the nostalgic hit, which premiered Jan. 15, 1974.On Tuesday night, Jan. 15, 1974, Richie, Potsie, Ralph and Fonzie entered our living rooms for a visit that would end up lasting more than a decade.Created by Garry Marshall, “Happy Days” arrived as a comic but earnest chronicle of adolescence in 1950s Milwaukee. It revolved around Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and his equally hormonal pals — Warren “Potsie” Weber (Anson Williams) and Ralph Malph (Donny Most) — along with the rest of the Cunninghams: Richie’s younger sister, Joanie (Erin Moran); mother, Marion (Marion Ross); and father, Howard (Tom Bosley). (Chuck, an older brother played by a series of actors, disappeared early in the show’s run.)“Happy Days” didn’t really take off with viewers until a couple of seasons later, when it was retooled into a broader multicamera sitcom oriented around the local tough turned mentor and guardian angel, Arthur Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler), known the world over as the Fonz. In the 1976-77 season, “Happy Days” became the most-watched show on television, supplanting “All in the Family.” It ran until the summer of 1984, a total of 11 seasons, while generating multiple spinoffs — “Laverne & Shirley,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Joanie Loves Chachi” — and untold tons of Fonzie merchandise.In December, the surviving members of the original core cast — Howard, 69; Most, 70; Williams, 74; Winkler, 78; and Ross, 95 — met in a video chat to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Happy Days.” (Bosley died in 2010, Moran in 2017.) They reminisced about the special bond they felt at the time and have felt ever since, and how the elevation of Fonzie was integral to the show’s popularity. (Disclosure: I helped Williams on his campaign for mayor of Ojai, Calif., in 2022, and we are friends.)These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were some of the factors that helped “Happy Days” become a hit?RON HOWARD We had great chemistry, and the writers knew how to write for that, but I also think that this collision of Garry Marshall’s sense of young guys and fun and energy and [the executive producer] Tom Miller’s sense of what an American family meant at that time was the secret sauce of the show.HENRY WINKLER We were telling the same stories of the actual time, of the ’70s, but because it was placed in the past, it never felt as if the moral of the story was hitting you on the head.ANSON WILLIAMS When they changed to live audience, three camera, that’s when the chemistry really came in, when we could work together as a team every day.HOWARD And Henry created this amazing character that captured everybody’s imagination. There was an older guy called Fonzie, but he had six lines in the first episode. Henry, from the first moment, began offering the show, the writers, the actors, this other possibility.Early in its run, “Happy Days” was retooled into a broader multicamera sitcom.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesThe show arrived during Watergate and the waning years of the Vietnam War. Do you think people were eager to re-embrace what they saw as the values of the past?WINKLER It is exactly what everybody is looking for all the time: They’re looking for warmth and peace, some comedy, some relief. Anson said Tom and Garry created a team by creating a baseball team. We traveled all over the world. We played together, and the person who plays together stays together.How would you describe Garry Marshall’s role as the series progressed?MARION ROSS He was so important to the show. He was the father of this whole group.WILLIAMS Garry was also very influential for all of us to wear other hats in the industry. He wanted us to use the Paramount lot as a college: Learn other areas, watch other directors, come to the writers’ room. I think the reason all of us today are still involved and productive is because of Garry. He wanted us to have the best lives we could possibly have.HOWARD I’ve been around a lot of very talented people over my career, even before “Happy Days.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better boss, a better creative manager of people and ideas than Garry Marshall.WINKLER He was generous but also was structured. He took no bad behavior. One time, when he was announcing the guest cast, I said, “Garry, we have to hurry up because I’m flying to Arkansas.” He nodded, put down the microphone, grabbed me by my shirt, put me against the wall and said, “Don’t ever do that again, because they have every right to be recognized like you.” He kept us in line.Beginning in its second season, “Happy Days” aired opposite “Good Times,” which also premiered in 1974 and became a big hit with its own pop culture phenom, Jimmie Walker. Were you ever concerned that your show might not make it?HOWARD We slipped a lot in our second season, and the decision was made to move to a three-camera show in front of an audience. I had never done that. It terrified me, but it turned out to be an exciting experience. The other idea was to move the Fonzie character front and center. It was kind of a reckoning for me because the focus of the show shifted, and yet that was our way to win. The only thing I ever said to the bosses or the executives is, “What’s happened here with Fonzie is great. Just make sure that you understand, too, that we have a real chemistry here, and we think of ourselves as an ensemble.” I’m glad that they made the moves they made, whether I was 100 percent comfortable with them at the time or not. It was thrilling to see the show take off.WINKLER They came to me at ABC and they wanted to change the title to “Fonzie’s Happy Days.” I said, “If you do that, it is an insult to everybody I’m working with. Why fix something that isn’t broken? We are really good. I live in the family and that’s why I’m successful. I’m asking you, if you never listen to me again, leave it alone.”Winkler and Scott Baio, center, during a rehearsal in 1981. “Happy Days” ran until 1984, a total of 11 seasons.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesRon, is it true that had they done that, you would have left the show?HOWARD I told them I would leave. I don’t think I contractually could have. But I told them if you really want to change the name of the show to that, I would rather go back to USC and film school and what I was doing before the show launched.How do you look back on the experience now?WINKLER I thank God I was part of this ensemble. It is a gift from heaven that fell in my lap.DONNY MOST I used to stay [on the set] and people would say, “You’re done, you can go home.” Because we were one-camera then. I wouldn’t go. Marion and Tom [Bosley], I’d be watching them in the kitchen scene and watch Henry in his scenes. I wanted to stay and absorb it all.Donny, how did it shape of the rest of your life and career?MOST I met my wife on the show my last season. She was an actress and we’re married 42 years. People say, “What do you remember most about the show? Which episode? Which scenes?” What I remember are the conversations we had in between shooting or before a show.I heard the four of you guys are on a text chain.HOWARD Yeah, it really kicked off in Covid. We’ve always stayed in touch — gotten together, had a meal, emails and so forth.Is it rare for co-stars in a TV show to remain close for decades?WINKLER I always thought if you work with somebody for six months, you make a movie, you’re going to have dinner with them when it’s over. Then you call them, and you’re still waiting for them to call you back. That didn’t happen with our show. Anson is an entrepreneur, has created products. Marion has gone on to act and do plays. Ron is a billion-dollar director. Don Most has a combo and travels the country as a crooner.WILLIAMS And a great crooner.It has to be at least partly because of the time of life when you got to know each other, right? If you had met in your 30s or 40s, it might not have happened that way.MOST I remember Ron comparing us to army guys who had been in the trenches together.HOWARD We were transforming together. We were growing up. Tom Bosley was teaching us how to get life insurance, homeownership loans. We had our first children and marriages.At the peak of the show’s popularity in the late 1970s, the Fonz was one of the most popular characters in the world. Wasn’t there some moment at a Dallas mall when the scale of it became clear?WINKLER There were 25,000 people. Don kept saying, “How are we going to get out of here? What happens if they all start moving forward?” For the first time, I used the character off the show. I looked at the crowd and said, [in the Fonz voice] “All right, listen up, you’re going to part like the Red Sea.” They honestly did. We got into the limousine and were able to take off.Henry, how did you deal with the popularity and when it was over?WINKLER I wrote about it in my memoir. I think there is an emotional component to dyslexia. For me, anyway. When everybody was talking to me, I knew it was practically good to keep the show going and we’re all making a living, but I couldn’t believe they were talking to me. My sense of self was so damaged from when I was younger. When the show was over, I sat in my office at Paramount and I had psychic pain. Because I had just lived Plan A. I didn’t have a Plan B. I didn’t even think about a Plan B. I’m sitting there not being able to be hired.In the heyday of “Happy Days,” the Fonz was one of the most popular characters in the world.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesAs the rest of you saw Henry getting so big and taking over the show, did it ever make you jealous?WILLIAMS People ask me that question and I’d say, “Are you kidding? The Fonz bought me a house.” He was probably the most popular actor in the world for a while but it never came to the set. As popular as he was, it didn’t change anything as a team. That’s a big deal.HOWARD You couldn’t be jealous of it because it was 1,000 percent earned. Here’s this guy who created this character, a guy we all immediately loved working with and were inspired by, and audiences dug it. Anything other than maximizing that character wouldn’t have made sense.Ron, what did you see on the show that helped you become a better director?HOWARD [The director] Jerry Paris. Brilliant at staging us, and when you’re doing a three-camera show in front of an audience, it is all about character movement and staging. He knew I wanted to direct and so it was a tutorial.MOST You cannot underestimate the contributions Jerry made to our show. He directed most of the episodes and was in there day in and day out. He was a genius at what he did.At the center of the show was the relationship between Richie and Fonzie, the strait-laced kid and the guy with the jacket. How did that develop?WINKLER We were brothers on the set. I could go somewhere, in my imagination — in the middle of a show — Ron would go with me like we were attached by a thread. It was unspoken.HOWARD I grew up on “The Andy Griffith Show” and used to see Andy playing the straight man role, whether it was with the Barney Fife character, Don Knotts, or with Frances Bavier [Aunt Bee]. I witnessed somebody who took a lot of pleasure and joy out of riding along with people who were going to get the laughs but needed it to be a partnership. I intuitively built upon that experience.WINKLER Ron, you were an unbelievable partner.HOWARD It was a blast. More

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      Pat McAfee Apologizes Over Role in Aaron Rodgers-Jimmy Kimmel Feud

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      Rodgers, the Jets quarterback, suggested during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Kimmel had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein, leading Kimmel to threaten legal action.Pat McAfee on Wednesday apologized for airing comments that Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers made toward Jimmy Kimmel on McAfee’s ESPN television show a day earlier suggesting the late-night talk show host had a connection to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.“Some things obviously people get very pissed off about, especially when they’re that serious allegations,” McAfee said. “So we apologize for being a part of it. I can’t wait to hear what Aaron has to say about it. Hopefully those two will just be able to settle this, you know, not work-wise, but be able to chitchat and move along.”Speaking on his weekly Tuesday appearance on McAfee’s television show on ESPN, Rodgers, a four-time winner of the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Award, suggested that Kimmel, the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC, was acquainted with Epstein, who was accused of having sex with minors and in 2019 died by suicide while in jail. Epstein was a longtime friend to powerful politicians and business executives, and the names of some of his associates are expected to be publicly released soon in court documents.“There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, really hoping that doesn’t come out,” Rodgers said on McAfee’s show. Kimmel denied the allegations on X, formerly known as Twitter, and threatened potential legal action against Rodgers.“Your reckless words put my family in danger,” Kimmel said. “Keep it up and we will debate the facts further in court.”ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney, placing McAfee and both entities in an uneasy situation. The predicament highlights the leeway ESPN gives McAfee, including the regular appearances by Rodgers, who has used his time on the show to speak out against vaccines and even challenged Travis Kelce to a debate during a recent appearance. In October, McAfee confirmed a report that Rodgers had been paid over $1 million to appear on the show.Spokesmen for ABC and ESPN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.ESPN signed McAfee, a former N.F.L. punter, to a reported five-year, $85 million contract last year to bring his popular digital show to the network and to appear on other programing. The hire came as ESPN underwent layoffs as part of an overall cost-cutting strategy from Disney.McAfee stands out among the network’s other personalities, often using profanity on what had long been family-friendly programming and eschewing the usual business-casual attire for tank tops. Though he has scaled back on the coarse language, ESPN has hoped his show’s freewheeling format would attract new viewers as the network’s business model changes.“We’re not putting a suit and tie on him,” Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, told The Wall Street Journal in September. More

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      Lara Parker, a Memorable Witch on ‘Dark Shadows,’ Dies at 84

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      Her three-dimensional portrayal of a character who was also a vampire helped the Gothic soap opera develop a cult following.Lara Parker, who found small-screen fame in the 1960s and ’70s as a beguiling and vengeful witch on the popular Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died on Oct. 12 at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 84.The cause was cancer, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, a friend and fellow “Dark Shadows” actress.“Dark Shadows,” seen daily on ABC from 1966 to 1971, was a departure from standard soap opera fare, blending romantic intrigue with horror and science fiction. The show chronicled a wealthy and eccentric Maine family dealing with the usual soap melodramas — but also time travel, ghosts, werewolves and vampires.With her icy beauty and elegant demeanor, Ms. Parker proved coolly seductive in her primary role among several on the show, Angelique, an 18th-century servant girl and witch who puts a curse on a wealthy shipping scion, Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) after he spurns her for Ms. Scott’s character, Josette, turning him into a vampire and dooming the two to carry on a tempestuous cycle of passion and revenge as they time-hop through history.Despite the pulpy premise, Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her role. “I played her as somebody who was much more of a tragic figure, who was desperately, desperately in love,” she said in a 2016 interview with Den of Geek, a pop culture website.In doing so, Ms. Parker, whose character also dabbled in vampirism, and Mr. Frid helped expand the two-dimensional portrayals of vampires and witches seen in old Hollywood B-movies.“When you’re invited into someone’s living room in a show that is essentially bodice-ripping horror, you have to make yourself palatable to the household, which in those days mostly meant housewives and children,” Ms. Scott said in a phone interview. “Lara and Jonathan did that by bringing a dimension of vulnerability, so you cared about the characters as people, not just evil forces. In that way, ‘Dark Shadows’ was really the granddaddy for all contemporary vampire films.”As the show grew in popularity, Ms. Parker found herself continually recognized by loyal viewers on the streets — although not always in ways she expected. “I used to get on the subway platform when school let out at 3:15 in the afternoon,” Ms. Parker said during a television appearance in the early 1990s, “and instead of the fans coming up and asking for an autograph, they would run.”Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her portrayal of Angelique. She played the character, she said, as someone “who was desperately, desperately in love.”Everett CollectionLara Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey on Oct. 27, 1938, in Knoxville, Tenn., to Albert and Anne (Heiskell) Rickey. Her lineage included the Confederate general James Longstreet and L.Q.C. Lamar, a Mississippi statesman who achieved a national profile as a congressman, senator and Supreme Court justice after the Civil War.Ms. Parker, who went by the name Lamar, grew up in Memphis, where she attended Central High School, and eventually earned a scholarship to Vassar College, where she studied philosophy, before transferring to Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in Memphis.She later studied speech and drama in a master’s program at the University of Iowa and had several lead roles at a repertory theater in Pennsylvania before moving to New York City. Within two weeks, she was in the cast of “Dark Shadows.”After the show went off the air, Ms. Parker moved to Los Angeles, where she turned her attention to prime-time television, appearing on “Hawaii 5-0,” “Kung Fu,” “Baretta,” “The Incredible Hulk” and other shows, as well as several television movies. She also had a powerful, if brief, role as a prostitute who tries to revive a client after he has a heart attack in the 1973 feature film “Save the Tiger,” for which Jack Lemmon won the Academy Award for best actor.Still, Ms. Parker’s relationship with the show that made her famous was far from over: “Dark Shadows” become an enduring cult favorite to new generations of horror fans, and Ms. Parker fed their obsession after turning her attention to writing. In 1998, she published “Dark Shadows: Angelique’s Descent,” the first of her four novels inspired by the show, which chronicled the early life of her character.She also helped revive the show on the big screen, appearing, along with her former co-stars Ms. Scott, Mr. Frid and David Selby, in a cameo role in the 2012 feature-film version of “Dark Shadows,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, with Eva Green as Angelique.Ms. Parker’s survivors include her husband, Jim Hawkins; two sons, Rick and Andy Parker; a daughter, Caitlin Hawkins; and a grandson.In the years following her breakout role, Ms. Parker discussed the significance of the show, which in her view helped modernize — and sexualize — the vampire figure in the years before “Twilight.” To her, this seemed only natural.“The bite itself is like the act of sex,” she once said. “There is penetration, and there is pleasure and there is abandonment.”“The story of the vampire goes back to before the Egyptians, before the Greeks, and exists in every single culture,” she added. “Why is it so widespread? Not because it’s true, but because it contains the truth of our fears and our desires.” More