If you like Twilight, you’d probably hate The Vampire Diaries. The Vampire Diaries is not the CW’s cheaper, Robert Pattinson-less Twilight knock-off. True, they’re both about angsty, perpetually teenage vampires, but that’s where the similarities end. TVD vamps have a sense of humor. Plus, they actually act like vampires – meaning they have sex and kill people. A lot.
The premise of The Vampire Diaries premise is pretty simple. Girl meets boy. Boy turns out to be vampire. Boy turns out to have incredibly hot, frequently shirtless, older vampire brother. Girl turns out to be the doppelganger of the vampire who turned the brothers both into vampires during the Civil War. Love triangles, mistaken identities, and plenty of deaths ensue. And that all happened while the characters were still in high school.
Is this show ridiculous? Obviously. It’s on the CW, which also currently has a show about forbidden alien love and the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow. (CW, please stop trying to make teen-appropriate threesomes happen. They’re never going to happen.) But TVD’s commitment to ridiculousness is what makes the show epic.
The show throws out crazy plot twist after crazy plot twist, and still somehow makes time for heated make-out sessions. It goes through more storylines in one season than Gossip Girl had in six. Sure, sometimes it’s hard to remember TVD history – and forget about keeping track of who’s dated who – but the breakneck pace is what makes TVD so compulsive. If you only yell “WHAT?!” at the screen once in an episode, TVD isn’t doing its job.
The characters are just as twisted as the plot. That moral gray area is TVD’s biggest, most overlooked asset. Teen shows are supposed to be easy. The good guys win. The bad guys lose. Sure, the football players will probably cheat on a cheerleader or two along the way, but everybody always ends up with exactly what they deserve.
Not on The Vampire Diaries. The main character, Elena, is kind, brave and devoted to her friends. She also once orchestrated the genocide of thousands of vampires. Why? The explanation, like everything else on TVD, is complicated, but involves a mythical tattoo, one of the world's first vampires and lots of alcohol. While she was just trying to protect her friends from imminent death, Elena still strayed from her typical righteous self.
The supposed “good” vampire brother, Stefan, drinks only animal blood – because when he drinks human blood, he usually ends up ripping their bodies apart in his bloodlust. Even the show’s most “honorable” character likes to rip people’s hearts out with his bare hands. Characters’ motivations and allegiances switch every commercial break, and you never quite know who to root for.
Maybe most importantly, TVD isn’t afraid to do what every good supernatural show must: kill off well-written characters. If a show is going to have vampires, witches and werewolves, then it’s a show about danger. And there need to be stakes to the danger. (Puns.)
Important, sympathetic, enjoyable characters die all the time on The Vampire Diaries. Their loss isn’t forgotten. In fact, many of the characters are defined by just how much they’ve lost. In the fourth season, Elena burns down her family home because she has no family left. Somehow – and it might just be the very emo soundtrack – each death still feels shocking and meaningful, even when characters die in ludicrous ways. According to TVD logic, it is shockingly easy to get your neck snapped or to be set on fire. Somehow, Elena manages to get in a car accident on the same bridge. Three times.
Yes, vampires are kind of past their sell-by date. The Vampire Diaries premiered at the height of the cultural craze nearly six years ago, when True Blood was still relevant. Is TVD as good as it used to be? No. It doesn’t help that the TVD characters are now in college, a notoriously tricky time for teen shows. Even Buffy left UC Sunnydale as soon as possible.
It helps that the TVD kids rarely went to class anyways. Who needs calculus when you can live forever? Overall, the fascinating characters, the frequent hook ups and the shockingly high death toll still keep the show compelling. If nothing else, everyone on the show is very, very attractive.
Plus, if you ever want to feel better about yourself, at least you’re not the person who made this.