There’s no easy way to say it. I hate to start the blog on a negative note but the first episode of The Vampire Diaries is awful. I was horrified when I first saw it, and frustrated to realize I’d be stuck watching a crappy show until the bitter end, because my L.J. Smith loyalty is strong. The second episode (forthcoming) is even worst. Of course, the show quickly becomes awesome. But there’s a reason I tell newbies to endure the first few episodes, because, just when you’re ready to die from the awfulness, the series suddenly becomes absolutely amazing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The pilot is better once you’ve seen the seasons that come after it, because you can stop cringing over how bad it might get and instead focus on what it does right. And it does do some things right.
- Visually, it has already developed its identity. Yeah, the fog effects go away over time, and the wire work involved in vamp-leaping (luckily) gets much better as the show goes on. But on the whole the pilot is visually interesting and sets up the standard the show continues to follow. It’s dark, literally. Scenes are lit with seeming natural light, and so if an actor’s face is shadowed or obscured, the show’s content to let that be. The spaces are wide open and feel real, like you actually are in a real city, that one place leads to another and that there’s always more beyond the edges of each frame.
- Musically, this show is awesome. Chris Mollere, who’s the music supervisor, has excellent and eclectic taste that starts here and continues throughout the seasons. I guess the CW demands that its shows be music heavy for the sake of synergy and profits, but who cares. Mollere has a gift for choosing songs that complement but don’t overshadow the action, which is all you can ask for. He’s led me to some seriously wonderful groups.
- The sets are beautiful, as are the actors.
That’s about it for the good. The bad:
I won’t say everything else. But yeah, kind of. I’m not interested in making this some rant, because I don’t passionately hate the pilot. I don’t think it’s very good, but few pilots are. And a good deal of the bad can be found in virtually every pilot out there. So I’ll just itemize the bad items off the top of my head, without making this some litany.
- The acting is not good. It will get great over time, but it’s not very good here (no one is really used to their characters yet, I think).
- The plot isn’t very interesting.
[There’s so much vampiric saturation in pop culture right now, and that might deserve part of the blame. Because every project out there has to go through the obligatory ‘there’s a vampire, but s/he is keeping it a secret, but humans are maybe catching on and of course vampires are impossible, right?’ that gets so tedious after the 5,000th time. I don’t think any vampire series finds the discovery of vampires to be interesting, just whatever they have planned for the vampires to do. So every series out there boringly waits for the tedious discovery to get done with so the plot can actually get started.]
- So anyway, the plot here is that the new high school year starts and for some reason a 161 year old vampire wants to attend. He wants to pursue this girl who’s the clone of his old girlfriend (this dysfunctional bit of wtf could have been interesting if they had played it up, but they did not). People are being killed and Stefan doesn’t know who’s doing it. And then he finds out that his brother, who acts like a silent-movie-villain here, is responsible. It’s less exciting than it sounds. Elena’s parents died and she’s getting over her grief for the new year in high school. I like how it shows that just getting through the day at high school requires putting on a constructed brave face, because high school really sucks like that even for non-orphans, and I like that they didn’t overdo it here. For me, this was the most relatable aspect of the pilot. She meets Stefan and decides he’s cute. Overall, the plot of the pilot just goes through its paces. It’s too busy establishing its world to be an interesting story in and of itself.
- The dialogue is so-so, veering close to bad (and sometimes nailing it).
- It’s campy, both as a high school show and a horror show. I’m very glad they decided to leave that aspect behind.
Final verdict. It’s not very good and I wish the show had started in a stronger place, but it does some important heavy lifting. It’s not good, but when you rewatch it after seeing later episodes you realize just how much it did accomplish for long term foundation.
Grade: (generously) C-