'Vampire Diaries,'
little new to bite into
CW drama closely resembles the 'Twilight' series
By Tom Conroy
Sep 10, 2009
Even people with only the vaguest awareness of the pop-culture phenomenon that is “Twilight” will get a feeling of déjà vu when watching “The Vampire Diaries.”
Whether or not the resemblances between the two projects are coincidental, the bigger problem is that neither one is that original.
Like the “Twilight” books and movie—as well as HBO’s “True Blood” and CBS’s short-lived “Moonlight”—“The Vampire Diaries” starts off by setting up an impossible romance between a young, beautiful woman and a brooding, sexy vampire who for some reason no longer needs to bite people regularly.
For the record, the first “Vampire Diaries” books came out a decade and a half before the first “Twilight” book. But both draw on a centuries-old tradition of gothic romance in which a relatively naive young woman falls in love with a dangerous but irresistible man.
What’s important is coming up with new variations on the theme. In that respect, the premiere of “The Vampire Diaries,” airing on the CW on tonight, Thursday, Sept. 10, at 8 p.m., is a failure.
The only thing that is unexpected in the show—whether it be the plot turns, the action scenes, the subordinate characters or the acting choices—is how often it opts for the expected.
This actually is surprising because one of the series’ co-creators and executive producers is Kevin Williamson, who back in the ’90s reinvented both the teen-slasher movie genre (with “Scream” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer”) and the teen-coming-of-age TV genre (with “Dawson’s Creek”).
In the “Vampire Diaries” premiere, we meet a high school student named Elena (Nina Dobrev), whose diaries are filled with sad reflections on the recent death of her parents. On the first day of school, she finds herself attracted to a new kid named Stefan (Paul Wesley), especially when she learns that he also keeps a diary.
OMG! Sometimes they even write the exact same thing!
The two diaries provide lots of unmemorable voice-overs, culminating in a “Grey’s Anatomy”-style montage showing where the main players are at the end of the episode, with Elena telling us the life lessons we all should have learned.
One of Stefan’s diary excerpts reads, “I simply am not able to resist her.” It turns out that he and Elena may literally have a history together. Plus, sometimes when he’s around her, his eyes darken and veins in his head bulge. In one of Williamson’s early funny scripts, this might have been meant to be a sly allusion to those embarrassing physical reactions that teenage boys sometimes have in public.
But there’s no time for laffs in “The Vampire Diaries.” Elena and Stefan have to deal with the usual obstacles to high school love—chief among them an ex-boyfriend who won’t let go, an envious blonde who wants Stefan for herself and a mean jock bully.
Worse, Stefan has an older brother, Damon, played by Ian Somerhalder (“Lost”), who has a grudge against him and hasn’t adopted a non-human diet. (He teases Stefan for eating squirrels.) Somerhalder seems to be having a good time playing the bad boy.
Unfortunately, he’s the only one who’s having any fun in the premiere.
Williamson has said that he was reluctant to work on adapting the books for TV because of the similarities to “Twilight.” Perhaps that attitude infected the entire cast and crew.
Williamson has also said that the “Vampire Diaries” books eventually take a unique turn and that the series will do the same, but quicker. Little in the premiere will encourage viewers to return in order to find out if that’s true.
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