The eight-season run of the Vampire Diaries ended quietly on Friday night, without a hint of the outsized media fanfare so liberally bestowed on series finales in television’s so-called golden age. The glossy adaptation of LJ Smith’s young-adult novel series, even before its latter-season decline in form and ratings, never did inspire the type of sophisticated critiques reserved for the major-network or cable darlings. But even amid a landscape that’s only been further crowded by the emergence of Netflix and Amazon, there is a place for the pure concentrated entertainment that was offered up for years by the CW’s deliciously pulpy supernatural soap opera. Television will be poorer – and a less fun place – without it.
The series premiered in 2009, between the second and third Twilight movies and a year after the debut of HBO’s True Blood, the peak of a bull market for vampire-related properties that, as one contemporaneous report estimated, generated no less than $7bn for the industry. The story of an orphaned teenage girl whose life becomes entwined with a pair of vampires in a small Virginia town conveniently populated top down with absurdly beautiful-looking people could have been easily dismissed as an attempt to ride the coattails of a genre boom. Which, let’s be honest – it was.
Except the Vampire Diaries was better than all of them, certainly superior to the gratuitous, tryhard True Blood and second only to Buffy in the all-time pecking order. What started as a conventional teen soap – the sort of glossy fare churned out methodically by the CW (see: Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, the 90210 reboot) – managed to get better with every episode following an unspectacular pilot. By the first midseason finale, co-creators Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson were consistently punching above their weight, working dutifully within genre from a mélange of timeworn tropes – doppelgängers, split personalities and cliffhangers – only to adroitly subvert them at perfectly unexpected moments. Holding it all together was Ian Somerhalder’s magnetic scenery-chewing as impish blood-sucker Damon Salvatore and Nina Dobrev’s convincing portrayals of virtuous protagonist Elena and the delightfully wicked Katherine, more than compensating for Paul Wesley’s dull-as-dishwater Stefan, the third party in the love triangle that anchored the early seasons.
But it was the show’s breakneck pace that truly set it apart in an era that’s come to be defined by a glut of slow-burn prestige drama, an abundance that can often make consumption after a long day’s work feel like a chore. There was a transactional expectation for entertainment with the Vampire Diaries, episode for episode, that other programs couldn’t match. Major characters were killed, or worse, with intoxicating frequency. Story arcs that other series might have milked for an entire season were gutted of filler and condensed to three-episode mainlines. Stuff happened. Not every choice worked – the moonstone plot line in the second season was a bit of a clunker, and there was very little about the Travelers that made sense – but enough of it landed to make the journey enjoyable. And there were consequences, oftentimes weighty enough to alter the trajectory of the series.
Until there weren’t. Dobrev’s departure from the series after season six – though she returned for Friday’s finale – coincided with the launch of The Originals spinoff. The stakes felt tempered as the expanded universe of werewolves, witches, ghosts, heretics and hybrids began to blur together. A burn rate that always felt unsustainable proved just that. But none of it can take away from the deft storytelling and inimitable thrills it achieved at its rollocking heights.
Television is no longer sneered at and looked down upon like it was before series such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and Deadwood established the medium as a venue for legitimate cultural debate. Confession of my Vampire Diaries affinity over small talk at a book party or gallery opening will typically elicit blank stares and side-eye, proof positive that unabashed yarns such as the recently departed series still exist outside the prestige bubble. That’s both to be expected and too bad. Shows such as these might not be vitally important, but damn it if they’re not wildly fun.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion