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The Vampire Diaries

By posted at 3:13 pm on September 10, 2009 4

“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up.  She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”

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4 Responses to “The Vampire Diaries”

  1. Will
    at 10:11 pm on September 10, 2009

    Am I the only one that wants to take way too much Ambien over terrible vampire stories being compared to Dickens?

  2. Emily
    at 4:20 pm on September 11, 2009

    No. I’m with you. Though it is true that the site of suffering for young people in contemporary popular entertainment is high school (My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the loathesome Vampire Diaries), whereas Dickensian and Brontean child heroes usually did their suffering elsewhere–the streets of London, workhouses, remote bleak English landscapes, etc. (not always true though; in Nicholas Nickleby there’s that horrible Yorkshire school, Dotheboys Hall, and there’s Lowood in Jane Eyre).

    Vampires Diaries, by the way, was godawful. Made me think better of Twilight–which I firmly believed impossible. Mary McNamara’s review was much more entertaining than the show itself. My apologies to any who might have taken a look.

  3. YA Wednesday: Beautiful Creatures | Daily Blog Posting
    at 1:37 am on September 17, 2009

    [...] The Los Angeles Times calls the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, based on the YA series by L.J. Smith, “a good old-fashioned Gothic love story.” (Via The Millions) [...]

  4. BiteMeGently
    at 7:29 pm on September 21, 2009

    Honestly, I liked this show. It stays very true to the novels yet includes the audience expectancies. One thing I know for sure: It’s way better than Twilight!

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