Why ‘The Vampire Diaries’ Co-Creator Kevin Williamson Said No to the Show at First
The Vampire Diaries was late to the vampire lit party. The Twilight movie franchise had already begun in 2008 and True Blood had run for several seasons on HBO. By 2009, The Vampire Diaries co-creator Kevin Williamson was worried the show would be seen as a rip-off so he turned it down.
Eight seasons and two spinoffs later, Williamson need not have worried. But he was on a 2009 Television Critics Association panel answering questions about the popularity of vampire media.
‘The Vampire Diaries’ made Kevin Williamson say ‘Oh God’
Williamson already had experience with trends. After he wrote Scream, teen slasher movies came back in a big way. He even benefited, getting his script for I Know What You Did Last Summer into production. Still, he worried how vampire fans would see yet another piece of media based on a series of books.
“I worried a lot,” Williamson said. “I was like, ‘Oh, God, we’re the ripoff.’ No one wants to do that.’”
Kevin Williamson said no to ‘The Vampire Diaries’
The fear was enough to make Williamson pass on The Vampire Diaries at first. Then something changed his mind.
“And I actually said, like, ‘No way,’” Williamson said. “And then we read the books.”
We being Williamson and co-creator Julie Plec.
“Julie and I wanted to work together on a project,” Williamson said. “Julie and I have worked together on and off since Scream. So we wanted to work together on a project. Kyle XY was coming to an end, and I was just sitting around, just tweeting. And so I was like, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ A friend of ours at The CW had this book and it all came together. We were like, ‘Well, okay, all right. We’ll see what we can do.’”
Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec still made their adaptation stand out
The L.J. Smith books inspired Plec and Williamson, but they still put their own twist on The Vampire Diaries. It wouldn’t be Williamson if he didn’t.
Once we got into it, it’s sort of a challenge. It’s like, ‘What can we do differently? What can we add to it?’ The pilot was very tough because it does have a lot of similarities to Twilight, and there’s no way around it. We had the story as he comes to town, the first day of school. That is the book. So we sort of are telling it in sort of that fashion, but we’re switching things around.”
Williamson said the weekly stories of The Vampire Diaries made the show different from other vampire lore.
“Once we get into it and we can establish all the characters, which the pilot, we had 10 characters to get out in 42 minutes, it’s tough,” Williamson said. “Now we can sort of sit back and start telling stories on a weekly basis. Then it all changes. That’s when you’ll see the differences, because you’re watching a weekly show. We’re not a movie with a beginning, middle, and end. We’re actually evolving, and we get to evolve and just tell the stories, and it just sort of unrolls.”
And it’s a good thing Williamson didn’t give up on the sheer notion of a vampire show, or there’d be no Originals or Legacies either.
