Aside from the insanely gorgeous cast, the brilliant and genius writing, and the jaw-dropping twists and turns, part of what makes The Vampire Diaries one of The CW’s biggest hits is its snap-fast pacing and tone of the overall show. With ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars and MTV’s Teen Wolf drawing inspiration from Diaries’ and being tonally similar, it’s no wonder why they have been hits on their respective networks as well.
With The Vampire Diaries’ showrunner, Julie Plec, also helming the highly anticipated spin-off, The Originals, viewers can expect more of the same — or even better — greatness that we’ve come to love about Diaries. OMFGtv had the opportunity to sit down with Julie Plec (also one of the minds behind the new series, The Tomorrow People) in July and talked with her about the tone of the new show.
“[It’s] literally darker and tonally darker,” Plec reveals. “New Orleans in and of itself is full of cool mystery and voodoo and ghosts and spirits and cemeteries. Just the setting itself gives so much more of a gothic tone and a more operatic tone than what we do in sweet little Mystic Falls.”
“The tone of The Originals is much more cemented and actually begins with the power of family and redemption,” she continues. “I think Vampire Diaries was two brothers that had been sort of estranged from each other and the love for the same woman brings them back to orbit each other and then we kind of used that for the launching platform. And [The Originals] is about the brother saying my family has been so fractured for so long and now here’s the hope of this child that maybe can help me put the family back together. And of course it’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be fun and it’s probably going to go really, really, really badly. It’s very much about the power of the family unit. This is not a show that’s rooted in a love triangle.”
Though she says the off-shoot is not rooted in a love triangle, don’t rule it out. There will be triangles and Plec says “they will be born organically out of the characters, and chemistry between actors.”
“We definitely have some hardcore awesome romance that we launch into right away,” adds Plec, “but we didn’t want to create the love triangle as the series’ premise and then shove it down your throat. We want to let the audience and us as storytellers to discover it along the way.”
The Originals premieres this fall on The CW.