Review: The Vampire Diaries, "Pilot"

There's a new student at Mystic Falls High School. His name is Stefan Salvatore. He's smolderingly hunky, has a dark past, and wears a black leather jacket and sunglasses. He's also a vampire.

He is immediately drawn to protagoniste Elena, a goodhearted teenager with a tortured past (car crash; she survived, her parents didn't) who happens to be played by the same actress as his dead girlfriend from 100 years ago. Elena spends her days writing in her diary under her parents' tombstone and being pursued by Stefan's evil vampire brother Damon, who always appears accompanied by billows of dry-ice fog and his pet crow.

In a vampire nutshell, this show sucks. It's the bastard child of The O.C. and Twilight.

The Vampire Diaries is a textbook example of what happens when a committee of middle-aged entertainment executives who haven't been out of L.A. for fifteen years get together and conceptualize a show about middle-class, suburban teenagers. Almost every single character is immediately identifiable by role: we've got the varsity-jacket-wearing jock's jock, the troubled younger brother (he smokes marijuana-- "I can't sit by and watch you destroy yourself!" shouts Elena in anguish, presumably concerned about his rate of Dorito consumption), the skank, the snarky teacher, and, of course, sexy, sexy Stefan, who turns the heads of each and every female character with his black leather jacket and shades. ("hawt-e staring @ u," texts one teen in reference to Stefan.) The only obligatory high school stereotype missing is the token gay, though the jury's still out on Damon.

The Vampire Diaries has none of the self-awareness of similarly cliched-as-hell contemporary high school show Glee and will, therefore, probably never redeem itself for its awful triteness, as Glee has through a zealous satirical touch.

What else can even be said about this show? It displays flashes of unintentional humor, such as Elena's angst over her brother's consumption of the devil weed, or the following exchange:

"You can't keep following me around like a lost puppy!"

"When was the last time you had sex with a puppy?"

Damon, please put some of these characters out of their misery.

The soundtrack is semi-recommendable. It varies from the atrocious (an Avril Lavigne cover? Why??) to the purchase-worthy (Placebo's "Running Up That Hill).

I'd only recommend The Vampire Diaries for its b-movie appeal and the presence of the incomparably pretty Ian Somerhalder as evil Damon.