I'm no Twi-hard. I'm not a milf soccer mom overly obsessed with a fictional underage vamp or a teeny bopper shrieking adolescent. So it's considerably weird that I currently find myself a fan of
The Vampire Diaries. A show by all rights I should not find as entertaining as I do.
Yes, it's a supernatural soap-opera with love triangles and the occasional brooding. But more than almost any other show,
Vampire Diaries entertains me like few shows do. As Todd VanDerWerff at
The AV Club put it, "I know we're not supposed to like things with vampires in them ...
Twilight is stupid.
True Blood
is uneven ... We are tired of sexy vampires ... I know we thought it
might be fun to check in on this show ... If nothing else, it would
provide a great
opportunity for mockery, or so we thought, right?" Wrong. As VanDerWerff and I both soon discovered:
"There are two kinds of TV ... There is the kind of TV that is
deliberately trying to tell you some sort of story and create compelling
characters you'll care about. It wants to build a world that's worth
exploring and give you something edifying to think about every week... Your
Mad Mens, and your
Breaking Bads ... But there's another type of show, a
show that simply aims to make you gasp with laughter at just how fucking
audacious it is, at how much it is going over-the-top and doing crazy
shit.
The Vampire Diaries is the latter kind of show ... and ... it is REALLY GOOD AT THAT."
VanDerWerff I think oversimplifies the matter a bit; there's more tv shows than just those two types (and even if there weren't,
Diaries doesn't really fit into that latter category), but he does make a fairly interesting point. There are multiple reasons we go to watch tv. To tv critics who spend all their time watching tv shows, it's understandable that the top notch dramas are what gets their blood rushing. However, these types of shows aren't the only ones out there. There are talk shows, game shows, reality tv, sitcoms, and even the news. But as VanDWerff goes on to point out, "This [second] kind of TV is, I think, HARDER
to construct than something really well-wrought. It requires coming up
with plot twists and insane character moments on a weekly basis, and it
tends to burn out really, really quickly."
And ultimately, that's what proves to be most impressive about the series. It pulls off what many other less intelligent series fail to. It hasn't burned out yet. It hasn't gone off the rails. It's actually become more entertaining to watch and more solid of a show as the plot, and mythology have expanded and become more intricate. The themes have matured and deepened. The writers have nailed the structuring of episodes. In fact, what everyone is anticipating is for
Vampire Diaries to finally jump the shark. Because sooner or later the show that goes for those crazy moments (and I'm overstating this a bit because
Diaries doesn't just do crazy moments, although it does do a lot of them) tends to forget its characters in the name of the twists. For example,
The O.C. was a surprisingly entertaining show for awhile there; it had some, almost too predictable, crazy moments but it was pretty fun while it lasted. But then in its third season it started to lose itself and become pretty painful to watch. The show started dragging its feet under the weight of the maddening soap-opera enveloping it.
VanDerWerff is right when he says its harder to construct a series for this second type of show. Think about all the "well wrought" shows. Sure, great dramas like
The Sopranos and
Battlestar Galactica failed to stick the landing, but no one thinks about that. In stead, they remember all the great television these shows provided before that. But with the second type of show (the so-called "audacious" ones), no one remembers when (if ever) it was actually good and highly entertaining. They just remember when the show lost all sense of purpose and when its misguided attempts at audacity made the show ludicrous (e.g. True Blood). It's seen as superfluous; this novelty of a time gone by. Most people barely remember why
Grey's Anatomy or
Desperate Housewives were juggernauts for a time. That's because they dwindled over time. They couldn't sustain the forward momentum that's so difficult to craft.
The "audaciousness" VanDerWerff ascribes to certain types of shows is perhaps a bit ill labeled. These aren't shows that are necessarily entirely intentionally trying to be audacious, but, rather, they're often situated in genres that force their hands. That require them to provide content and stories that constantly keep you engaged and, when done right, invested in the characters (or at least their scheming).
Diaries does attempt some crazy stuff but it's very familiar with the genres its playing around with, e.g. soap, supernatural, thriller, etc. And it more often than not subverts cliches and formulas in surprising and inventive ways that maintain tension, suspense, and the "oh shit" factor.
But like the best series out there,
Vampire Diaries really isn't about its central premise.
The Sopranos wasn't just about the mob.
Deadwood wasn't just about the Old West.
Mad Men isn't just about the 60's. These conceits are Trojan Horses for exploring greater questions and themes on a range of issues, including gender, sexuality, identity, masculinity, community, power, and morality, among many others. That isn't to put
Diaries on the same level as these shows, but to say that its far more intelligent than your average series. In fact,
Diaries has more in common with
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (who it takes a number of cues from) than
True Blood. On the surface,
Buffy was not the series you'd think would go on to influence a huge amount of series out there; it was primarily about high school and vampires. But Joss Whedon, the show's creator, used the series as vehicle for exploring a number of issues (including almost every single one of the previously mentioned), while never forgetting the characters at the heart of the story.
Diaries explores a range of themes from loyalty and identity to community and sacrifice. And at the same time, it never ceases to be immensely entertaining, with crazy back stabbings (both figurative and literal), double crossings, and scheming.
Now getting back to a previous point, I'm man enough to admit that I can be a bit of a cultural elitist sometimes. I like watching intelligent programming. I love
Breaking Bad. I'm a fan of
Mad Men. I'm enjoying
Homeland right now. I'm obsessed with
Game of Thrones. Even my comedy tastes skew to the more intelligent:
Parks and Recreation,
Louie,
Arrested Development,
Community, etc.
But I also like watching programs that are simply fun and that are good on purely an entertainment basis. I adore
Doctor Who. I like popping in on
Family Guy every now and then (even though it kind of sucks now). I'm also a fan of its Seth MacFalane counterpart
American Dad (which is far superior to
Family Guy).
The Walking Dead still holds my interests. I find
Adventure Time and
Regular Show highly amusing. Like I said before, I was even a fan of
The O.C. I stuck with
Heroes for awhile, even when it began to derail. I (sadly) took guilty pleasure in
The Jersey Shore for its first two seasons. In short, sometimes we watch television to be challenged; to think deeply and meaningfully. And sometimes we watch tv to be distracted. To watch something that is simply built as a piece of entertainment and is pretty good at it too.
The Vampire Diaries fits this latter category too a tee, and, despite some initially slow beginnings where the writers were getting the structure and tone of episodes down, it has proven to be one of the best crafted shows on television. Granted, there are far more intelligent shows. For example, I'm also currently watching
The Wire.
The Wire is brilliant; no one is denying that. It is incredibly rich, complex, and ambitious. And it's a show that forces to me think deeply about a myriad of difficult issues. But
The Wire isn't a show that the word "fun" initially springs to mind about. Sometimes it's nice not to have to deeply ponder meaningful issues; sometimes I simply want to watch a show, just to watch a show.
And
The Vampire Diaries provides ample opportunity for that. The show is one of the best written shows on television. It knows exactly what it is, and it doesn't try to be anything more than that. It's a supernatural soap-opera, sure, but damn if it isn't wonderfully crafted. The show moves with the deliberation and speed of a freight train, delivering more storylines in a single season than some shows do in two. And yet it never short shrifts these stories, letting problems simmer long enough for them to be interesting, but never long enough for you to grow tired and bored. And yet in the midst of these plot contrivances, the show still manages to, as Carrie Raisier so wonderfully
described it, "to squeeze in ... conversations about feelings and junk."
I started watching the series based on the recommendation of
The AV Club (a site for pop culture obsessives who spend more time watching tv shows than any of us), and I found it highly surprising when V
ampire Diaries popped up in their
list of top tv shows for 2011. And it made me decide to take a look at the show. What initially started out as a guilty pleasure soon turned into a show I no longer found myself providing excuses to justify watching. I was actually enjoying the show on its own merits. The series does start out slow, and it took awhile for it to find its rhythm, but once it did it became an unstoppable force of ridiculous twists, reveals, and cliffhangers. However, unlike other series that use twists like these to keep the viewer coming back, but eventually go off the rails,
Diaries successfully avoids letting the show lose itself. The twists are grounded in logical character motivations, which means even though their crazy twists, they never make the show completely lose itself.
What do I mean by "logical character motivations"? I mean the characters and their reactions take precedence over the twists. Lets take
Lost for example. Everyone was always talking about how
Lost just kept adding ridiculous twists and events that were seemingly confounding. In some instances this was true, but more often than not
Lost successfully pulled off its crazy reveals. For example, in the Pilot episode of
Lost, a polar bear comes out of nowhere. This is really weird since our protagonists are on a tropical island. The moment works, however, because it has less to do with that crazy moment and more to do with how the various characters react to it. Which begins to give us insights into who they are. For instance, Sawyer shoots the polar bear; we didn't know he had a gun and he wasn't trusting enough to let the others know this. We have just learned a great deal about Sawyer that will become highly relevant further down the line.
I recently watched
The Sixth Sense. In a lot of people's eyes,
The Sixth Sense is the only one of M. Night Shyamalan's films where his now infamous twist endings works. And it isn't just because the quality of his films in general declined after
The Sixth Sense (although they did). It's because in his later films we don't care about the twists. The twists tended to be so outlandish, so unjustifiable, so damaging to the premise and characters we had just witnessed that they could never sit well with audience.
The Sixth Sense is the exception to the rule because it actually grounds its twists (especially the now infamous end plot twist) in logical character motivations:
*Spoiler Alert* Bruce Willis has just spent the film helping a kid who sees dead people (notable because he failed to save a patient who made similar claims who would eventually go on to shoot him). Now having made up for his previous failures and redeemed himself, he is able to move on and therefore realize that, yep, he's been dead the whole time.
*Spoilers Over* The twist comes out of a series of sequential events that grounds the twist in the previous actions of the film, basing it in what's relevant to the protagonist.
When I say
Vampire Diaries is intelligent; I don't mean it's intelligent like
The Wire or
Mad Men where it's challenging you to think deeply or providing a complex narrative. I mean that the show is smartly written. This probably seems counter intuitive at first: the show is about twists, supernatural phenomena, and soap-ish drama. But it's really good at playing with the formula: kill a character here, add a character there and watch as loyalties shift. Writing is a big deal when it comes to tv shows.
True Blood is often compared (wrongly so) to
The Vampire Diaries. Attractive people. Supernatural phenomena. Crazy twists. But
True Blood squandered its interesting initial premise. In stead, it lost all sight of why it started in the first place (which was a bit thin to begin with), and then never really elevated itself above its initial flaws or falterings.
Lets take
Boy Meets World as another example. The show everyone remembers
Boy Meets World as is not the show it always was. The early years of the show are pretty bad to be honest. They read like bad PSA's. But people tend to ignore or overlook this. When they think about the show, they remember the later high school and college years. The times when the writers stopped underestimating their talent. When Eric (played by Will Friedle) got to say absurd and hilarious one liners. When at times the show allowed itself to be a bit surreal. The show (for the most part) had the same cast for its 7 year run, but not the same writers. Good writing can make or break a show. Bad writing is what burns a show out; it's the reason good shows lose steam and quality once they've been on the air for so long. Even before Steve Carrell left
The Office, the show was going downhill. The show was more on the air due to the studio refusing to let go of a valuable program rather than the writers having more stories to tell about their characters. And for the past four or five seasons it has continued to precipitously decline in quality and enjoyability. Good writing can also turn around a show.
Parks and Recreation and
Angel had terrible first seasons but had amazing turn arounds in their second seasons, leading to each show having a series of high quality seasons of television afterwards.
And
The Vampire Diaries has surprisingly good writing. It knows its characters; it knows the genre. The writers write themselves great openings for future conflict and character development. They make great use of callbacks. All the crazy is tied back to an emotional and character driven core. Or as Carrie Raisler nicely
puts it: "On top of all that plot and all of those surprising moments, there ... [is]
also a nice balance of quiet character moments sprinkled throughout." A point that I'll get into more in a bit is that shows that have "end of the world" type stuff going on on a daily basis only work if we're invested in the characters attempting to stop the crazy evil happenstances from taking place. Otherwise, you simply have characters that exist solely to conveniently move the plot forward. But, as Raisler
notes, the show does get us invested in its characters beyond simply the circumstances we find them in: "What ... [has become] abundantly clear ... is how
stealthily the writers have built something with so much more meaning
than simply story mechanics... What really resonate[s] ... [is] so much more: It ... [is] the emotions,
the relationships, and the ever-growing realization of just how much
this ragged band of [characters] ... [will] do
anything to take care of each other no matter the circumstances." On top of this, the story has a complicated sense of morality (both "good" and "bad" guys kill people, betray people, and do things to put everyone else at risk). The writers are supremely confident in the story they're telling and whenever you begin to doubt their ability to continue to pull off whatever they are attempting, they blindside you with story telling that is impeccably crafted, stridently entertaining, and never loses sight of the its emotional, character driven center that ultimately makes it all worth while.
Diaries also boasts a solid cast that nails the great material they're given. Most notable is Ian Saumerholder's work as (sort of) evil vampire brother Daman, and as Raisler so
perfectly writes, "This isn’t Emmy-caliber work, mind you, but it is a scenery-chewing master class on how to have a hell of a lot of fun." Nina Dobrorev also does a nice turn as protagonist Elena, a character played against type; she's never the "damsel in distress". On the contrary, she's strong-willed, driven, and often takes matters into her own hands. The acting is incredibly solid, often impressively nuanced and emotionally resonant.
Diaries is ultimately a genre show, and like the best genres shows it elevates itself above its initial premise. As Zach Handlen
put it, "The difficulty of a genre show is finding a way to balance obvious,
general reactions ('Oh my God, zombies!' or 'Oh my God, vampires!',
i.e., what basically anyone would say in a situation with zombies and/or
vampires) and character-specific reactions." Yes, vampires are going to create crazy scenarios which would have any normal people scared, bemused, angry, etc. But when characters become mere pawns to be moved around at the expense of the plot, that's when shows dig themselves a shallow grave. We need a reason to care about characters beyond the mere fact that their lives are in danger on a regular basis. Because after a certain point a few key characters generally become untouchable. They have been through so much in the story and survived, that to kill them off simply becomes too unimaginable and difficult for the writers. We as the audience recognize this, and therefore we are usually not fearful about these characters dying. Periphery characters we don't care about as much or villains may die, but the protagonists essentially cannot. So how do you get people invested in a series? You give them characters they want to see on a weekly basis. Not just because they're in ridiculous situations, but because the writers have nailed the character, their reactions to scenarios, their personality, their relationship to other characters, etc. This helps emotionally invest you in the characters and makes you want to spend time with them. Handlen goes on to say, "Part of the appeal of good TV is that we want to hang out with
characters we see every week—we’re drawn back for the laughs and the
excitement, sure, but there’s also that sense of getting comfort from
familiar faces." Characters make a show, not its premise; writers that do justice to their characters and remember to tie their stories back to the characters will almost always tell better stories.
In sum: "It's impressive not only in its ambition but especially in its
execution, as nothing feels rushed, and no one story is slighted."
Vampire Diaries is a surprisingly ambitious, inventive, and well-written series, as well as one of the most entertaining and fun series currently on the air. And it has no creative peer that's attempting what it's trying to do (at least not as ambitiously, intelligently, or successfully). Now, I haven't started the fourth season yet, but I'm confident in the writers capability to continue to churn out not only one of the best genre shows on televisions, but simply one of the best shows.
