TV is the New Reading

‘Vampire Diaries’ more interesting with ‘Buffy’ chaser

The CW turned in a solid pilot episode for its angsty teen vampire drama “The Vampire Diaries” Thursday and it made me really appreciate “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Oh, I can hear you now, what’s wrong with me? Why does every vampire show have to come back to that ridiculous cheerleader? And you’re right, the show stands on its own two fangs as a classical vampire romance. Teens wandering through the cemetary in the fog, falling under each other’s spell. The dark, recently orphaned Elena writing in her diary near her parents’ grave, and the vampire, Stefan Salvatore, aided by a mysterious gem that allows him to walk by day and enroll in high school, trying to live a normal life because memory is important.

See, dialogue like that is the sort of stuff that yanks me right out of the storyline, which is why I prefer the series through a “Buffy” filter. There are immediate and strangely legitimate analogs between everything that happened in the pilot episode and the characters in Joss Whedon’s angsty action adventure series.

If Elena is Buffy, then her parents, Hank and Joyce, are already dead, and her little brother, Jeremy, who’s constantly getting into trouble, is Buffy’s little sister Dawn. Buffy encounters Angel in much the same way as Elena encounters Stefan. However, Stefan, the “good” vampire, has an analog in his older brother, Damon, as the “bad” vampire, Spike. Stefan is drawn to Elena because she reminds him so much of Darla, I mean Katherine, a girl he loved in the 1860s.

Elena has a best friend, Bonnie, a slightly psychic Willow. We even have Caroline, who's a sort of sympathetic Cordelia type. A party in Mystic Falls, Va. -- the Sunnydale in this series -- ends in tragedy when a girl, Vicki, is discovered with neck trauma, but not dead. Jesse -- I mean, Vicki -- one of Spike’s victims -- I mean, Damon’s -- is probably the one who’s going to tell everyone about there being vampires in Mystic Falls. End of the pilot episode, it looked like Cordy was about to hook up with Spike, and if she becomes a vampire, then this whole thing is just like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in an alternate reality.

And to be perfectly fair, when you’re a huge fan of one franchise you’re naturally going to find parallels. This series so far features good and bad vampires but hasn’t told us the difference, really, beyond Stefan choosing not to drink from humans. Vampires cast a thrall, they create spooky fog when they’re about, they can fly, or at least glide. They’re introducing the mythology at their own pace, but so far it appears that they can’t cross the threshhold without an invitation, either. We’ll see what else they can do as the series continues.

Full week

Quite a few premieres and returns coming up this week. The Jay Leno primetime show premieres at 10/9c on NBC. It’s billed as something completely new and different -- a talk show, but in prime time. So in theory, a guest could be in competition with their actual show. What an oversight. Fortunately DVRs record multiple channels, but I fail to see what’s so awesomely new and different about Jay Leno at 10/9c versus Jay Leno at 11:30/10:30c. I guess, starting Monday, we’ll all have a chance to find out.

New episodes of “One Tree Hill,” “Gossip Girl,” “90210” and “Melrose Place” on the CW, by the way, and that’s really all I’ve got to say about that, XOXO. ABC is also premiering something Wednesday night called “Crash Course” which sounds like another unscripted gem.

The CW is also premiering something called “The Beautiful Life,” an Ashton Kutcher production featuring Elle Macpherson as head of a fashion magazine and a bunch of young hopefuls trying to break into the modeling biz. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but when Pamela Anderson Lee did it in “VIP” she was some sort of undercover investigator as well.

Capitalizing on the popularity of fake news as entertainment, Saturday Night Live expands the I suppose now-they’re-ready-for-primetime players purview to Thursday night with “Weekend Update” at 8/7c, followed by a gay wedding in the return, somehow, of “Parks and Recreation” -- don’t worry. They’re penguins. That’s followed by the return of “The Office” and the premiere of Chevy Chase and Joel McHale in “Community.”

The big geekout news on Thursday, however, are the season premieres of “Bones” at 8/7c and “Fringe” at 9/8c on FOX. When we left our heroes, Anna Torv’s agent Olivia Dunham had stepped off of an elevator that took her to an alternate universe where she met Leonard Nimoy as mad scientist Walter Bishop’s long time vanished colleague William Bell.

I’ll have more on that next week when I stop hyperventilating.

“The Beautiful Life” premieres Wednesday at 9/8c on the CW, and “The Vampire Diaries” continues Thursdays at 8/7c, also on the CW.

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