Comic-Con First Look: The CW's 'Vampire Diaries'

'The Vampire Diaries'

Credit: The CW

When "The Vampire Diaries" decided to screen its entire pilot for the Comic-Con audience, knowing how well "Twilight" has done here in recent years and how well the Comic-Con audience likes vampires in general, it must have seemed like a slam dunk. Instead, the panel got caught in a perfect storm of situations pretty much designed to mean something would be received derisively by the Con's attendees. It's almost enough to make one feel bad for the show until one considers that, well, "The Vampire Diaries" pretty much sucks. Once one thinks about it that way, it's easier to enjoy just how loopy the screening got.

The biggest problem was that "The Vampire Diaries" got squeezed in between two panels that would attract people who were pretty much the opposite of its intended teen girl audience: the screening of the pilot for comic book based "Human Target" and Zach Snyder's screening of his director's cut of "Watchmen." Because the Snyder event was so hotly anticipated and because the room it was being shown in was not nearly as large as Hall H or Ballroom 20 (it was room 6BCF for some reason), everyone who was excited for that screening began filing in super early, if they weren't there already for "Human Target."

Add to that the throngs of "True Blood" fans booking it from the panel for that show, which overlapped with the "Diaries" panel by a few minutes, and filling in the rest of the room, and you had a hot, sweaty room with an uneasy proportion of vampire fans to superhero fans ready to mock a teen soap with pretty boy monsters. "The Vampire Diaries" pilot would have received a tepid reception had it been the "Lost" pilot under these conditions, but, instead, it was just not that good and the sort of bad that quickly tips an already hostile crowd over into outright contempt.

Before the "Watchmen" and "True Blood" fans flooded the room, "Diaries" was just playing to a mostly dull and damp room. There were a few laugh lines that garnered some chuckles, but for the most part, the half-full room just didn't seem that into the thing. Once the room filled to capacity, the laughs began in earnest. But they were mostly aimed AT the pilot, viewers cheering ironically at the slightest of dramatic beats or snorting when the show's female lead (Nina Dobrev as tortured human teenager Elena) talked at length about how she didn't want to be alone only to have the male lead (Paul Wesley as tortured vampire centenarian teenager Stefan) turn up on her lawn, glowering at her. Mock yelps at the bits that were supposed to be scary were the order of the day, and the groan when the final act break didn't prove to be the end of the show was so loud I'm sort of surprised executive producer Kevin Williamson mounted the stage.

"The Vampire Diaries" isn't very good, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have done well at Comic-Con. There's definitely an audience for this sort of thing, and the front of the room was packed with teen girls who seemed more into it than the geeks out for "Twilight" blood but willing to take a pale lookalike if they could get one, and most of them asked very flattering questions of the panel afterward. Had the show not gotten stuck with much of its natural audience sapped off to "True Blood" and in a room that was going to fill with people openly hostile to it, it might have done all right for itself. But, instead, it was trapped in the room from Hell for a show like this.

To the "Diaries" haters' credit, they didn't bombard the post-screening panel with lots of angry questions (though that might have been amusing), choosing instead to just hold their own conversations over the top of what Williamson, fellow executive producer Julie Plec and several cast members were saying to the few who wanted to hear what they had to say. Most of the excitement from the panel stemmed from cast member Ian Somerhalder confirming that he will be back on "Lost" in its final season if "Diaries" can find the time to spare him (and Williamson and Plec said they'd do whatever they could to make it happen, though one presumes The CW will have something to say about it). Somerhalder seemed to gain most of the appreciation from the room during both the screening (where his campy performance was one of the few highlights) and the panel (where his former role on TV's reigning genre hit meant a warm reception). Plus, he was honest about how little the network wanted to cast any of the leads as the characters they play. "The process of getting these roles I think for each and every one of us was extraordinarily horrible," he said.

Williamson and Plec did their damnedest to defend the show, but their answers grew increasingly rambling as the noise from the audience grew louder and louder. Both seemed excited to deal with the show's differing take on the vampire mythos (where the major point of difference from the traditional mythos seems to be drawn from vampires only gaining strength from drinking human blood, something Stefan refuses to do). Both fell in love with the world of the books the series is based on, liking how it featured both a vampire story and a detailed small town (Williamson went so far as to compare it to "Dark Shadows"), and when they talked about what the show could be, it was almost enough to create nostalgia for how this show might have worked on The WB of the "Dawson's Creek" era.

Williamson, in particular, seems to have a bead on what would make a good show about teenage vampires, talking about how one can only create a good show about hope if it dabbles some in hopelessness. "Every character in this book is dealing with loss. They're dealing with death. They're dealing with life," he said when explaining why he wanted to turn the book into a series. Sadly, it seems, he just didn't manage to quite pull it off.