FALL TV EXTRAVAGANZA
THE ORIGINALS
** (out of ****)
As I watched The Originals, I had no idea it was a spin-off of The Vampire Diaries, and for that I’m going to applaud The Originals. Maybe it was tortuous for VD fans (heh) to have shit they already knew explained to the noobs. The more common mistake for spin-off pilots is to explain too little, relying too much on the idea that its viewers will be die-hard fans of the original series. In contrast, The Originals creates its own fleshed out world.
Other that that, it’s a show on The CW. What do you want from me? Would you like me to sit down and explain to you what all of the bad shows on The CW have in common? The Originals is simple. It’s cheesy. It’s characters are rote. The dialogue is often terrible, and the actors are always trying too hard or not enough. As a viewer, you probably either stay away from The CW completely, or you have long since accepted all of this. I would never let any of these things slide. If you show me your balls, however, and that you can at least juggle a couple of them at a time, I won’t scream at the TV. Believe it or not, I didn’t scream.
The Originals are the two original vampires: the honorable, put-upon brunette Vampire – who we’ll call Brown – and the rebellious, crazy blonde brother, Yellow. Yellow is pissed because everyone, especially his stepfather, has always treated him like a dirty werewolf, when he is half-werewolf at most. He’s also pissed because he wants to be the king of New Orleans again, but that position has since been filled by Yellow’s former protege, a douchey party vampire. Party Vampire is in a war with all of the witches in New Orleans. We didn’t get to meet the mummies or the Gill Men in this episode, so they’ll probably be introduced later on in the season.
Don’t get me wrong, The Originals sucks. It’s not that it knows it sucks – it probably thinks it’s great – but it also doesn’t care about doing the things it doesn’t care about doing. If you don’t want to create a character piece, don’t do it. Sure, that puts pressure on the other aspects of the show to cover up the flaws, a pressure the show will probably buckle under. It’s much better than wasting valuable minutes of your episode by going through the motions of developing characters when you don’t want to do it, and you suck at it anyway (I’m looking at you, every new show of the fall.) Watch Beauty and the Beast and Hemlock Grove for better examples of how The Originals could have been much worse.
– Ryan Haley