Bad Pun Alert: Vampire Kinda Sucks

While all involved will likely deny it, any similarity between The CW’s new drama The Vampire Diaries and True Blood (itself an imperfect show, to be sure) is almost certainly intentional. When your network is flailing, why wouldn’t you want to crib from what has become a cultural phenomenon? But if you add Twilight to the list as well, I think this is one vampire project too many.

Developed by Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek) and Julie Plec (Kyle XY) from a series of books by L.J. Smith, Diaries tells the story of Elena Gilbert (Degrassi: The Next Generation’s Nina Dobrev), a high school student struggling with survivor’s guilt brought on by the deaths of her parents in a car accident months earlier, and Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley, who previously played a werewolf in the short-lived Wolf Lake), a vampire who, way back in 1864, was in love with a girl who looked exactly like Elena. Showing up to put a stake in Stefan’s romantic intentions and make good on his promise to create “an eternity of misery” for his sibling is brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder), a nasty vamp who tries to persuade Stefan to give up his self-imposed human feeding fast.

The teen drama clichés all put in early appearances: sex, drugs, rebellion, dead parents. And the vampire tropes are here, too: super hearing, the ability to seduce people into a kind of goofy submission (what True Blood calls glamouring), the need to be invited inside someone’s house, and oodles and oodles of moodiness. (Luckily for Stefan, the oldest-looking high school student this side of Ian Ziering, a special ring allows him and his brother to go out in the sun, otherwise he'd never be able to graduate.)

Maybe it just isn’t possible in 2009 for a vampire show to be anything but derivative, but couldn’t they at least try? I can appreciate the need to be faithful to the books, but if the show is to last for any stretch of time, the writers will eventually have to stray from their source material, just as Dexter has managed to do so deftly. Considering the ordinariness of events so far, it may have been wise to abandon the book's story from the outset.

What’s really missing from the show, though, is a little levity; everyone in this town is so deadly serious all the time. I guess it makes sense coming from the vampires since they’re, you know, dead (or is it undead?), but the teenagers should lighten up and have a little fun. Thankfully, the dialogue is more natural than the teens-can-use-big-words-too approach Williamson took with Dawson’s, but that doesn't mean anybody has anything all that interesting to say.

The scenes between Wesley and Somerhalder (looking like he’s having a better time here than he did on his single season of Lost, where his Boone was the first major character to die) have a certain dark pizzazz reminiscent of the good vamp/bad vamp dynamic between Bill and Eric on True Blood. But that energy dries up as soon as they leave each other’s company, and all we’re left with is a fairly dull soap opera in desperate need of some real bite.