It seems "The Vampire Diaries" has arrived at exactly the right time — "True Blood" wraps up its second season this weekend, leaving a vampire-shaped void in our television-watching schedule. If last night's premiere is any indication, the new CW show will do quite nicely as our newest blood-sucking obsession. While "True Blood" is a little on the mature side of the vampires-on-film trend (read: racy), the sexy vampire-in-love-with-strong-willed-mortal-girl story has been translated to high school by Kevin Williamson, who has combined the soapiness of his "Dawson's Creek" with the creepiness of "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" with a dollop of his trademark wit to top it all off.
Fans of L.J. Smith's "Vampire Diaries" books might argue about the details, but it seems to me, a "VD" virgin, that the show follows the same premise as the book series: Elena, who has recently lost her parents in a car crash, starts her senior year of high school and meets two vampire brothers. Love triangle ensues.
What's good: The casting. Nina Dobrev, who plays Elena, is appropriately angsty for someone who just lost her parents, but manages to still seem pleasant and good-natured (and I'm not just saying that because I loved her on "Degrassi"). You probably could guess our stance on Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder, who play the hunky undead brothers, since we've already named them our Hump Day Hotties this week. And bonus points for Kayla Ewell, who plays Vicki, because she was on a couple of episodes of "Freaks and Geeks" and that show is just awesome.
What's not-so-good: The beyond cheesy smoke machine. Remember in the "Twilight" movie, when Edward revealed himself in the sunlight to Bella and instead of him looking magically sparkly, it just looked like someone went at him a little too enthusiastically with the body glitter? Well, at least they tried to make that look cool. When Elena was sitting in the graveyard and it got all creepy and foggy, you could actually see where the smoke machines were sitting on set. They couldn't try a little harder to make that a better special effect? Hopefully they'll up the FX budget for the upcoming episodes because the smoke machine was super lame.
Despite its flaws (well, really just that one), "The Vampire Diaries" shows a lot of promise. Like Elena's probably psychic friend said at the end of the episode: it's only the beginning. There are a lot of storylines opened up in the pilot that will be interesting to explore.
What did you think of the premiere? Will you keep watching, or would you rather read the books?
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