I Was Feeling Epic: An oral history of The Vampire Diaries
Samantha Highfill
Plume Books
Caution: Spoilers!
What do you do when you know you have the best idea for the next hot young adult drama for the CW network, but everyone keeps telling you that the vampire genre has been done to death? If you’re co-creators Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec, you keep pitching your concept over and over until someone stands up and takes notice and gives you the money to film a pilot episode, which leads to a television series that wowed audiences for eight seasons and created two spin-off series.
The Vampire Diaries began in the 1990s as a book series popular in its own right, but then the Twilight phenomenon began. It rode the crest of popularity for young and sexy vampire protagonists into the ground with its endless movie sequels most producers thought. Kevin and Julie, however, felt that Diaries was different enough and special enough to hold its own. The love triangle of recently orphaned high schooler Elena and the two vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon, who return to the town of Mystic Falls was unbeatable and addicting. In the casting, they strayed a bit from the books’ characters (Elena played by Nina Dobrev is a brunette and not a blonde, for example), but its themes of dealing with grief, love, and redemption are the same. From Nina and Stefan’s first kiss to the unexpected first death of a major character to the doppelganger character of Katherine, the paranormal romantic storylines enthralled viewers.
As co-creator Kevin Williamson says about how they finally figured out the hit series’ writing process: “Everything needs to be epic, every episode has to be epic. The stakes have to be high; someone has to be in jeopardy; we have to have some big, huge, scary set piece; we have to have some big threat to one of our characters; and, more importantly, we have to have some sort of resolve that’s emotional and we need the Kleenex moment. And we finally were able to figure it out and share it with the other writers and we got somewhere. But it had to be epic.”
Entertainment Weekly executive editor, Samantha Highfill, a huge fan of the show, brings to life the behind-the-scenes intrigues and challenges of dealing with a young cast working and playing together through interviews with cast and crew members alike. Definitely this book is a must-read for fans of The Vampire Diaries series, but television and film students will also enjoy learning about how much blood, sweat, and tears actually goes into producing a show that became an immortal hit.
