The Vampire Diaries

Right, well it’s been 37 posts since we’ve had anything about vampires, so I thought I might as well chuck the old classic show Vampire Diaries into the mix.  I haven’t finished a boxset in a while, and it seems readers can’t get enough of teen fodder from our younger years (I’m looking at you, everyone who read about Gossip Girl), so why not?  Let me, as a 33-year-old man, write about a show aimed at teenage girls, that I mostly watched when I was a 20-something-year-old man.  And then you can read it and, together, we can all take a quick break from the monstrous season that is Christmas time.  If, like me, you’ve looked on in disgust while office co-workers shovel a month’s worth of advent chocolate into their gobs on a single day, or you’ve had to restrain someone physically from cracking out the festive playlist on Spotify before the end of November, then really ‘tis the season for the bloodsucking undead as an antidote to empty yuletide greetings at the end of every email.

On paper, Vampire Diaries is an exercise in ticking almost every box regarding my preferred televisual themes.  It’s set in an American high school, so all the characters get to hang out in front of lines of lockers on an impossibly glamorous campus, in stark contrast to my old school, the misleadingly posh-monikered Howard of Effingham, where lesson changeovers were characterised by bundles, high-up banister daredevilry and acne.  So far, so much escapism.  Secondly, we have the supernatural.  As if the pressures of growing up in this day and age weren’t enough, imagine having to cope in the midst of budding relationships with vampires.  Gripping plotlines ensue as we join the main characters in navigating such pitfalls as: being allergic to the sun, being thirsty for blood, and, of course, being evil.  Ah, them teenage years.

My cursory research reveals that we have eight series of this show to enjoy, but I really don’t think for a minute I got too far past season six.  Back in 2009, I probably made appointments to view the show at obscure hours on ITV2, but then I also recall various DVDs arriving on my Lovefilm subscription.  Sure, the initial premise of the opening series was gripping.  High-schooler Elena falls for handsome classmate Stefan Salvatore, only to find out he’s a vampire.  We’ve all done it, right?  Luckily, he has a conscience to balance out his murderous tendencies, but his cheeky brother, our Damon (played by a chap who was offed in the first series of Lost), is not burdened by such inconveniences.  His every crack is so wise that his dialogue eventually makes your skin crawl.  And wait, both brothers are so handsome that even after they’ve murdered you, you’ll still get lost in their eyes.  I assume the high school purged all of its students with below average looks in a public burning.  You can’t blame them.  Each episode seemed to culminate in an event in the beleaguered town of Mystic Falls (should have guessed, really) a bit like The OC, only the tension came not from social faux pas caused by the intermingling of the classes, but from the unleashing of bloody hell when some demon or rascal attacks the town and, mostly, the school.

Of course, to give the whole thing legs, the vampires were soon joined by other creatures.  Elena’s bestie gets into witchcraft.  You’ve got some werewolves in there, some hunters, some original vampires (cue spinoff) and many more.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer, anyone?  But then, a few series in, we flesh out plot contrivance to a whole new level with the arrival of the doppelgängers.  Suddenly, we don’t know if we’re dealing with lovely Elena, or Katherine, her naughty naughty twin.  Then we start swapping back and forth between which brother has a conscience and which brother is evil.  The plots wind themselves up more tightly until all the cast can do is frown in order to understand them.  As with Teen Wolf, complexity is mistaken for intrigue and the sheer volume of storyline becomes overwhelming.  And I don’t remember seeing a diary at any point beyond the first few episodes either, but Elena must have had her hands full diddling about with both brothers.  So I dialled out.

That’s not to say I don’t regret my decision.  This was a sexy show and, for a time, it filled an inexplicable need of mine to be consuming some sort of vampire content.  But ain’t nobody got time for plots that tie themselves in too many knots.  The Vampire Diaries only finished in early 2017 and who knows how it ended.  Maybe the doppelgängers got their own twins and inflicted triplegängers on a confused audience (this happened) or the leading lady was absent for whole series (this also happened).  Either way, I still have unrealistic expectations that vampires will enter my day-to-day life.  I’ll keep a beady eye out at the office for sure, but chances are it will be too busy casting withering glances at my Christmas-enjoying colleagues to spot the real bloodsuckers.