Julie Plec and Marguerite MacIntyre are two of some of our favorite TV creators, having worked on The CW’s hit series The Vampire Diaries and its spin-offs The Originals and Legacies. This time, the duo takes their magic prowess from broadcast television to NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock for their latest project, Vampire Academy.
PopWire sat down with the two frequent collaborators this past summer, where they discussed why the famed book series of the same name was prime for a television adaptation.
“Richelle Mead wrote a great series of books,” MacIntyre tells us. “She has her own vampire rules, there are different kinds of vampires, there’s a class system that is inherent in this, which makes it timely, which makes the ‘why now’ of it so evident for us. She built this class system that was unsustainable. She built a class system in which there were haves and have-nots and people doing all the work for people who are not really doing the work. It’s all there.”
Marguerite shares that the series’ author had expressed to them that she had always imagined that the books would be great for television. “I feel that [Richelle Mead] felt that the social justice aspect of it was something that really meant a lot to her [and] we cared about that. That’s the great thing about vampire shows or genre in general to me. I don’t draw to genre for genre; I draw to genre because you can tell stories in this way under the radar in this metaphorical way.”
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For the Vampire Academy writing team, Plec shares that they treated the six-book series like writers would treat cards in a writers’ room. “When you have a good idea, you put it up on the card, and you don’t know where it’s going in the structure of the episode or the show, but you know you want to get there,” she explains.
“It’s our job as storytellers, as structuralists, to then weave those ideas in the right order in the right way so that we can tell — let’s knock on wood — multiple seasons of television that just goes on and on and on and on, encompasses the entirety of the series and then also maybe does something a little new. We’re very, very respectful of and loyal to the contents of the books, but we are also not telling that story in the same way that the books did.”
While going through the source material, Marguerite reveals she pictured Pennsylvania and Montana as the setting. However, the showrunners were able to secure a more magical location to tell their story.
“Because we had the luxury of going to Spain to shoot, we were able to create a visually sumptuous world that was even more of a visual than I ever saw when I read the books,” MacIntyre says. “Going to Spain and imagining it a little bit bigger, a little bit more beautiful, opening up that scenery, really creating the world from scratch, I think that makes it unique.”
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In addition to its uniqueness in creating a beautiful world from scratch, the unique rules in that world, and the timeliness of the series, one of the elements that she loves about the show is its unique blend of modern and ancient within the series.
“You’ll see castles; you’ll see a scene where someone is wearing a costume where you think it could be 1514,” MacIntyre says, “and then down the way is a dive bar and people going in and hearing rock and roll. That’s what I love about it.”
In a world of privilege and glamour, Vampire Academy follows two young women’s friendship transcending their strikingly different classes as they prepare to complete their education and enter royal vampire society.
“These young women in this story are inheriting a world that is broken,” she says. “What are they going to do about it — a world that is trying to tear them apart? Are they going to let it tear them apart and let it just go with the flow or are they going to do something about it?
“I think everybody, not just young people, has that same decision right now in this crazy world we live in,” Marguerite MacIntyre continues. “So I’m interested in being able to tell this beautiful, entertaining, awesome, luscious story, but that it has this underpinning that feels really resonant.”
Vampire Academy is now streaming on Peacock, with new episodes dropping every Thursday.
