- "We're a very romantic show but we kill people."
- —Kevin Williamson, seen here with Julie Plec at the Paley Center's Television Festival in March 2010
Love You to Death: Season 1 is the first book of the Love You to Death series, the unofficial companion to The Vampire Diaries.
Go deep into the heart of Mystic Falls with this episode-by-episode look at the first season of The Vampire Diaries.
Premiering in the thick of the vampire craze, The Vampire Diaries has proven itself to be much more than yet another addition to the overpopulated, undead pop-culture racket. Its mix of romance, horror, drama, and humor has won it great ratings for The CW, international acclaim, and a growing and devoted fan base.
Love You to Death: The Unofficial Companion to The Vampire Diaries is the essential guide to the show, featuring:
- the story of L. J. Smith who first introduced Elena and the Salvatore brothers in her bestselling book series;
- background on Kevin Williamson (Dawson's Creek, Scream) and Julie Plec (Kyle XY), the masterminds behind the adaptation from page to screen;
- biographies of the actors who bring Mystic Falls' residents to life (... or afterlife);
- insightful explorations of each episode with information on the rich history, supernatural mythology, film references, character development, and much more; and
- exclusive interviews with TVDers, like the much-loved Malese Jow (Anna) and the fandom's fearless leaders.
With photos of the irresistible cast and of the show's filming locations, Love You to Death captures the fun, fangs, and fear that make The Vampire Diaries so epic.
The Cast[]
- Nina Dobrev as Elena Gilbert/Katherine Pierce
- Paul Wesley as Stefan Salvatore
- Ian Somerhalder as Damon Salvatore
- Steven R. McQueen as Jeremy Gilbert
- Candice Accola as Caroline Forbes
- Zach Roerig as Matt Donovan
- Kat Graham as Bonnie Bennett
- Sara Canning as Jenna Sommers
- Matt Davis as Alaric J. Saltzman
- Michael Trevino as Tyler Lockwood
- Kayla Ewell as Vicki Donovan
Episode Guide: Season One[]
Excerpt from Love You to Death: Season 1[]
I've never watched a television show the way I do The Vampire Diaries. Each Thursday night, I head over to my friends' house with two others for dinner and to catch up, and then we tune in to the show. There's always some Team Stefan versus Team Damon trash-talking, some shrieks, and loads of theorizing during commercial breaks and after the episode ends, inevitably, on a cliffhanger. It's always a great time, thanks to the brilliance of the show and the company of good friends. But just like the show itself, these evenings together are about more than just light-hearted fun. One of the creators of The Vampire Diaries television series, Julie Plec, said in an interview in the spring of 2010 that the show's two primary themes are love and loss — and that's precisely what brings my group of friends together every week. After an unimaginable loss in the spring of 2009, my dear friend asked if we could have a regular hangout (which came to be known as "knitting club"), to be there for her and her husband, providing distraction, company, and an opportunity to talk openly. In September, we watched as Elena Gilbert tried to return to "normal" after the death of her parents, and it was clear right from The Vampire Diaries' pilot episode that, for us, this show wasn't just about hot vampires and teen romance. It resonated. As I got to know The Vampire Diaries fans online over the course of the first season, I could see how connected we all were to the series. This show isn't popular because we're in the throes of a vampire craze. That may be why The CW wanted this show on the network, but the success of Twilight and True Blood didn't guarantee that The Vampire Diaries would be the runaway hit it is. The series has earned the loyalty of its devoted fan base by being unrelentingly captivating, exciting, and emotionally honest. Stefan, Damon, Elena, and the rest of our friends in Mystic Falls want nothing more than real connections in their lives, and the audience at home responds to how heartfelt and human this supernatural world is. I wanted to write this companion guide to The Vampire Diaries because of that strong reaction we have to the series. Love You to Death is my tribute to a show that's come to mean quite a lot to me personally in just one season, to the people who create The Vampire Diaries and the audience who keeps the discussion alive offscreen. In these pages, you'll find chapters on L. J. Smith and her book series, on the creation of the show and the masterminds behind it, and background on the main cast members. After that is the episode-by-episode companion to the first season. Here's a mini guide to the guide: Each episode's write-up begins with a bit of dialogue that stood out for me either because it captures the episode in a pithy few lines . . . or it was just too well written not to acknowledge. From there, I provide an analysis of the episode, looking at its main themes, the character development, and the questions it raises followed by these sections:
Make sure you watch an episode before reading its corresponding guide — it contains spoilers for that episode (but not for anything that follows). Within the pages of the guide, you'll also find short biographies of the actors who bring the recurring characters to life as well as sidebars about other elements of the show and its influences. After the episode guide, you'll find an interview section featuring Q&As with three leaders of the fandom, with a fan who works on the show as an extra, and with actors Benjamin Ayres (Coach Tanner) and Malese Jow (Anna). Finally, I've pieced together a timeline for the past few hundred years in the tvd universe. If there's something you think I missed, or that I completely read your mind about, drop me at a note at crissycalhoun@gmail.com, @reply me on Twitter (@crissycalhoun), and/or stop by my blog at crissycalhoun.com for a weekly reaction to The Vampire Diaries. xoxo |
"Since I was too young to really remember . . . I looked for magic." Lisa Jane Smith read all about magical worlds in her favorite books by C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Smith wanted "to write for kids when I was a kid. I knew the kind of books I liked to read and there just weren't enough of them. Nothing to do but write them myself. I'd been telling myself stories ever since I was four or five, and writing them down was just the next step." With encouragement from a teacher who praised a poem she wrote in grade school (a poem which Lisa Jane now calls "horrible"), the budding writer started her first novel while she was in high school. In fact, the idea for the story came to her while she was babysitting. She took her time writing it, working on it slowly through college as she got her ba in experimental psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Looking back, Lisa Jane can see that she took to writing naturally: "It felt easy to write, I enjoyed doing it tremendously." But her parents warned her that making a living as a writer was a very difficult thing. So L.J. became a kindergarten and special education teacher, and she wrote in the evenings after spending her days at school.  Since she didn't own a typewriter, let alone a computer, Lisa Jane took her first finished manuscript to a professional typist. "She said it was the best manuscript she'd seen ... and asked if I was interested in being agented." The answer, of course, was yes. Though it took a little while, the manuscriptfor The Night of the Solstice eventually sold to Macmillan, and it was published in 1987. L.J. wrote in a blog post, "I'd started writing a book at 15 and it had only taken 10 years to get it published!" Her editor at Macmillan picked up the book's sequel, Heart of Valor, which was published in 1990. Both books were well reviewed but failed to generate a lot of sales, which L.J. suspects was in part the result of abysmal cover designs. Lisa Jane excelled at her teaching job and was nominated best teacher in the district by her school, but the amount of energy it took to work all day and write novels in her nonexistent spare time was too much. She left teaching behind to become a full-time novelist. "Every fall I get very nostalgic about teaching, but writing is more fun." With her focus completely on her writing, the 1990s would be an extraordinarily prolific decade for L.J. Smith: she would publish 22 books. The first four novels were a series, The Vampire Diaries, about a beautiful, self-centered teenage girl in a small Virginia town who meets two brothers with a dark secret that leads her and her best friends into the world of the supernatural. L.J. explains, "I was given a call by some people who wanted a trilogy of vampire books [...] and they said that they wanted me, within nine months, to produce three books about vampires. So the idea was that there were two brothers who were both in love with the same girl: one good brother, one bad brother. And I kind of like the bad brother better. That's Damon, and he's one of my favorite characters to work with. So it didn't come out exactly perhaps as it was intended, but it seems that people enjoy the effect, so I can't complain." In 1991, just months apart, Harper published The Awakening, The Struggle, The Fury, and The Dark Reunion known collectively as The Vampire Diaries. "The story is one of redemption," says L.J., "of how a girl who's really kind of a social butterfly and an egoist learns that she's not the [center] of the universe; she's not the thing the world turns around. And she realizes that other people mean a lot more than she does. And it's a story of redemption for the boys too, especially for Damon, who ends up finding himself with a choice to sort of stick by her side or to perhaps go with a greater villain and stay alive." The next year L.J. had another series for Harper, The Secret Circle, which centered on a young girl named Cassie who finds herself drawn into the world of witchcraft. In 1994 and 1995, L.J. Smith created two more threebook series, The Forbidden Game and Dark Visions. In 1996, the first book in the Night World series, Secret Vampire, was published. L.J. would stay in this world of vampires, witches, werewolves, and all manner of supernatural creatures for nine more installments. In each book, a Night World being and a human are drawn together by the "soul mate principle," which is not dissimilar to Stefan and Elena's initial attraction to one another. As the 1990s drew to a close, L.J. Smith's personal and professional lives entered a period of crisis. Her focus was on her family — on her brother's serious illness and on her mother's battle with terminal lung cancer. "For 10 years actually, just like a faucet, my imagination was turned off," said L.J. "And you can imagine what agony that is for a writer. I really wanted to write that whole time and was trying to, but I was not able to." After her mother passed away, L.J. began writing poetry about her mother. This helped her to continue writing, first short stories and then full-length novels; in fact, Smith felt this return to her craft was a gift from her mother. In the meantime, vampires had clawed their way back to the top of bestseller lists with the enormous success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga (2005–2008), and L.J. Smith's publisher wisely rereleased The Vampire Diaries with updated cover designs. "I was busy nursing my mom, and I didn't know that they had republished my books until they were telling me that the second one had debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list," said L.J. in an interview. Though she hasn't read any of the Twilight books or seen the films, L.J. is well aware of the similarities between her and Meyer's stories of human girls who fall in love with a good, animalblood-only vampires. "There's the floods of mail from people accusing me of stealing, and they list about 30 things from Twilight. I usually write back just one sentence: ‘Look at the copyright date.' Actually, I get a tremendous amount of apologies back." In her trademark style, once L.J. was able to write again, she worked at a frenetic pace and signed up for five more books, including The Vampire Diaries: The Return. "I had been negotiating with Harper to write an adult book for the series, but the ya department didn't want to let go of it. So there was a year and a half which ended with the negotiations going nowhere, but with me writing scenes for an adult book." That work wasn't lost; the world of ya had changed since the first Vampire Diaries books were published, and she could "essentially write my adult epic as three decent-sized ya books." (To compare length, the first tvd book is 253 pages; the first in The Return, 586.) The new group of books tell "the story of Elena falling in love with Damon to the same extent that she is in love with Stefan. So we have a real love triangle." Though Smith's writing explores supernatural worlds, it's consistently grounded by strong female characters, whether they are of the mortal realm or not. Characters like Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith from tvd and Cassie from The Secret Circle are strong-willed, courageous, and clever. L.J. calls this network of women the "velociraptor sisterhood" — after the "smart, fast, and utterly scary" velociraptors in Jurassic Park — who "[stand] up for your female friends and sisters when they need you most." Her advice for aspiring writers is simple: write, write, write ("Write anything and everything you like, and don't be critical of yourself. Just let it come out and worry about whether it's good later") and read, read, read ("Read all you can and read a variety of books. You'll absorb all sorts of good things, grammar, vocabulary, plot structure — even if you don't realize it. Try the classics, and keep trying them as you get older"). Lisa Jane Smith, who lives in the Bay Area of California, always favors the novel she is currently writing, but when asked to choose her all-time favorite of her books, she reluctantly admits it was "the first omnibus of The Vampire Diaries, because I put my entire self into The Vampire Diaries books. It's like the old maxim, ‘Writing's easy. Just sit down at the keyboard and then open a vein.' Singularly appropriate, yes?"[1] |
"I've had other things optioned before," said L.J. Smith about finding out The Vampire Diaries was to be adapted for television, "so my reaction was at first, ‘Okay, another one of those.' But then when they said it was by Kevin Williamson, I realized it was probably a little bit more serious." Kevin Williamson says he "grew up sleeping in front of the tv. I always wanted to make tv and film. I always wanted to live in a fantasy world." Born on March 14, 1965, in New Bern, North Carolina (not too far from a little spot known as Dawson's Creek), Kevin, his older brother John, and parents Faye and Wade, moved to Texas when Kevin was small, returning to Oriental, North Carolina, when Kevin was in his teens. Kevin's father was a commercial fisherman. Though in early interviews Kevin would joke that he grew up "white trash," he clarifies, "We didn't have a lot of money, but weren't white trash. I had wonderful parents, and they always provided. I always got what I needed." The resourceful 10-year-old requested that his local library subscribe to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, so he could keep up on industry news. He loved reading books and watching movies, but growing up a Southern Baptist in the Bible Belt was difficult for a boy who always knew he was gay. When his preacher spoke about sinners, homosexuals were mentioned in the same breath as murderers and rapists. A self-described loner in high school, Kevin did his ba at East Carolina University, studied theater arts, and dated his best friend Fannie. He moved to New York City to become an actor and landed bit parts, including a turn on Another World in 1990. The struggle to make a living eventually drove Kevin to Los Angeles to try his luck in the film industry there. In 1993, he decided to finally shrug off the words of a discouraging high school English teacher, who, in marking a short story, had told Kevin, "Yours is a voice that shouldn't be heard." He took a writing class at ucla and wrote his first script, Killing Mrs. Tingle (a revenge story inspired by that nasty teacher), and it got optioned. Kevin used that money to pay down his college loans, but the script languished with its production company. By 1995, Kevin was 30 and working odd jobs — walking dogs, taking shifts as a word-processing temp, slogging hours as an assistant; he needed a career to keep himself afloat. One night, alone in his apartment, Kevin heard a strange noise and, as he went to investigate it, he noticed a window standing open that he could have sworn he had shut. A little spooked, he locked the window and called up a friend. The two started throwing horror-movie trivia questions at each other, and with that, the opening scene for Scream was born. Williamson wrote the script very quickly, reportedly in three days. As he says, "The movie just came out of my youth. I grew up with a vcr; Blockbuster was my friend. The dialogue in the film comes from conversations I had with my friends about films from that era." He hoped to at least use the script as a writing sample; he did not expect Scream (which was originally titled Scary Movie) to provoke a bidding war. Dimension Films, a division of Miramax started in 1992, picked it up, and the legendary horror film director Wes Craven signed on. Kevin was nervous as he began his working relationship with Wes Craven, mostly thanks to "all the Hollywood stories about directors mutilating scripts." At their first meeting, however, "[Craven] handed me back the script and there were pages and pages of notes. It turned out they were all typos. He said to me, ‘I'm sorry, Kevin. I used to teach English and this sort of thing bothers me.'" The two would go on to work together again on the other Scream films and on Cursed. Released on December 20, 1996, Scream became the highest grossing slasher movie of all time, a rank it still holds over a decade later. Williamson was widely praised for revitalizing a tired genre, and he won the 1997 Saturn Award for Best Writing. It was a huge change for the formerly unemployed writer, who was now considered one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood. "Suddenly Miramax was looking for any Kevin Williamson project. I wasn't writing them fast enough, which I didn't understand, because I was writing them as fast as I fucking could." A year after Scream's release came I Know What You Did Last Summer, which performed well at the box office but didn't receive the glowing reviews Scream had. The film's villain was modeled, in appearance only, on Kevin's fisherman father. In December 1997, the same month that Scream 2 came out, Kevin signed a $20 million contract to write, produce, and direct movies and tv shows for Miramax. Bob Weinstein, then co-chairman of Miramax, said, "Writers that don't pander [to teens] win the game. Kevin understands this brilliantly, and he's got the talent to go with it." As Kevin Williamson readily admits, "Everything I do is autobiographical," and nowhere was that more evident than in his first television series, Dawson's Creek. First pitched to Fox but picked up by The WB, the teen drama centered on Dawson Leery, an idealistic wannabe filmmaker obsessed with Steven Spielberg films and struggling with his first romances in Capeside, a fictional Massachusetts town based on Oriental, nc. "I love the teen experience," said Kevin. "There is something very potent about teen drama in the sense that everyone is dealing with their first love." The show's teenagers talked about sex and feelings in an explicit and nuanced way not heard before on tv, and Dawson's Creek garnered a lot of attention for its language, content, and for that season 1 affair between Pacey Witter and Ms. Jacobs. The WB wisely slotted the show at 9 p.m., rather than during the 8 p.m. "family hour," airing it after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dawson's Creek premiered on January 20, 1998, to great ratings in its core demographic. Part of the show's magic came from filming on location in Wilmington, North Carolina. It "forces the cast to bond because we don't know anyone else," said Katie "Joey Potter" Holmes during Dawson's first season. In season 2, Kevin introduced the character Jack McPhee, a gay teen, whose experiences in a small-town high school were informed by Kevin's own. While discussing Jack's coming-out episode with the media, Kevin seized the opportunity to publicly confirm his sexual orientation. (He had come out to his parents back in 1992.) Kevin Williamson didn't leave horror movies behind while working on the Creek. On December 25, 1998, The Faculty was released. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Williamson's story of a high school whose faculty is taken over by water-starved aliens was a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Breakfast Club. As Kevin said, "That whole theme of conformity versus individuality fits perfectly into the high school metaphor. I got into that and tried to create the characters that interweave in a Breakfast Club way and then left all the cool alien shit to Robert." (In fact, a viewer familiar with the films of John Hughes can spot the alien-in-disguise among the main cast right away: there's the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess, the criminal, and the sweet-as-pie new girl. Hmmm.) After season 2 of Dawson's Creek, Kevin decided to move on to other projects. "I feel in my heart of hearts that it could have been better. If it was my full-time job — and I had nothing else tugging at me — it would have been better." His attention had been split between his directorial debut, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and Wasteland, a new series for abc about 20-somethings in New York City. The tv show centered on Dawnie, a late-blooming grad student writing her thesis on her friends' lives, one of whom is a gay but closeted soap opera actor. It premiered in October 1999, was ravaged by critics, and was canceled three episodes in. Teaching Mrs. Tingle didn't fare much better. The film, which was Kevin's very first screenplay, had been modified in the wake of the 1999 Columbine Massacre, and resulted in, as the New York Times said, "the incongruously toothless version of a sadistic fantasy." Entertainment Weekly had named Kevin an Entertainer of the Year in 1997, and yet their reviewer wrote, "Williamson, whose best work has melded humanity with a kind of media-savvy meta-playfulness, [made] a movie that dances so clumsily on the grave of empathy, pandering to the worst instincts in young audiences." The reason his work was lackluster was obvious to Kevin and everyone around him: he was badly overextended. Katie Holmes became close with Kevin and used to stay with him while in L.A. In 1999, she commented, "He works nonstop. All of us are always telling him to take a break. He is hard on himself because he's a perfectionist." Looking back on the late '90s, Kevin said, "It's what I call my insane period. . . . I did not know how to say no." In three years, he had written five screenplays, directed his first feature film, and created two television series. "I worked so much, I didn't have any personal life . . . I had a great home that I didn't see. I was sleeping on the floor with no pillow so I wouldn't sleep, so I would wake up every few hours and go back to the computer. That's insane! But I had deadlines. I was self-destructing. There's no way anybody could have met the timelines that I had, but I kept trying. I fell apart." He wrote an outline for Scream 3 but handed over the screenwriting duties to Ehren Kruger, and after Wasteland's cancelation he took a year off. "One of the things I learned while I was doing Wasteland is that writing about people in their 20s — who cares? . . . Nothing's life or death then. When you're 25, who cares if a love doesn't work out? You will find another one. But when you're 16, it's life and death. . . . There's your first love and your last love. Those are the epic moments." But his return to teen-focused television was still a few projects away. In January 2002, Williamson's Glory Days premiered on The WB as a mid-season replacement; described by Entertainment Weekly as "a Northern Exposure–cum-X-Files murder mystery for the mtv set," it was aimed at young men. Williamson didn't originally envision the show as a thriller, but the network asked for more scares. The story focuses on writer Mike Dolan, who returns to his small Washington hometown where strange things are happening (Twin Peaks, anyone?) and discovers he's unwelcome because his novel was too revealingly autobiographical for the town folks' comfort, a predicament Kevin was familiar with. "Dawson's was autobiographical," he said in 2002, "and I exposed things in the storylines that I got flak for — things about my family that people saw. I'd change the names and sometimes the outcomes, but you still hear about it. If I were dating someone and we got into a big fight, Dawson and Joey would get into a fight in the same manner." Glory Days didn't fare much better than Wasteland, and after only nine episodes had aired, the show was canceled. Though he hadn't written for Dawson's Creek since its second season, Kevin was asked to write the series finale in 2003. Opting for a flashforward so fans could see where the Capesiders ended up, Kevin said, "I put my heart into it, and I cried the whole time I was writing it." Fans still ask him about his resolution to the series' long question: who does Joey truly belong with — Pacey or Dawson? At the 2009 Paley Fest where Dawson's Creek was being honored, Kevin said, "Dawson and Joey are soul mates. And they always will be. . . . My whole goal for that was to show that, you know, your soul mate might not necessarily be the person [who's] your romantic love." After their writer-director partnership on Scream and Scream 2, Kevin was back working with Wes Craven on a Dimension Films werewolf horror movie starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, and Joshua Jackson. It was aptly titled Cursed, as the New York Times said, as it had to be "recast, reshot, and recut" before finally being released in February 2005. It was a box-office flop, and the Toronto Star opined that the "only thing worse than a bad horror movie is a bad horror movie made by good people." Kevin couldn't seem to catch a break; his next project, Hidden Palms, suffered the same fate as his last two tv projects. The CW series about the dark secrets of a gated community in Palm Springs premiered in May 2007 and was off the air by July. But Kevin was undeterred and was about to join forces with someone whom he'd met over a decade earlier. Julie Plec first met Kevin on the set of Scream in 1996. "I was Wes' assistant on Scream. It was [Kevin's] first movie that ever got made. My first movie. I was 22, just out of college. We were two kids in a candy store, up in Santa Rosa, California, on location, making a movie." Plec had graduated from Northwestern University's School of Communications in 1994 where she had become friends with Greg Berlanti. Before Berlanti would work on Dawson's Creek or go on to run shows like Everwood and Brothers & Sisters, he was a disillusioned and stalled writer in Los Angeles, and he credits Julie with convincing him to take another stab at writing. "[She] took me out for lunch where she read me the riot act for giving up on my dream before I even had a chance to fail at it. . . . Julie reminded me that there was a time in my life when I never cared about how successful I was at writing, just how much I loved it." After working as Wes Craven's assistant, Julie was promoted to his director of development. She worked as an associate producer on Scream 2 and Teaching Mrs. Tingle and became the vp of production and development at Outerbanks Entertainment (Kevin Williamson's production company, responsible for Dawson's Creek and Wasteland). Julie co-produced Greg Berlanti's romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Club (2000) and was back for Scream 3, this time as co-producer. In 2000, she left Outerbanks and landed at Ricochet Entertainment where she worked with Ricky Strauss as head of production and development. Said Strauss, "Julie's background in film and television is outstanding. She has excellent taste, and her commercial sensibility is right on the money." By 2005, she was once again working with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson on Cursed as co-producer...[1] |
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