The Vampire Siries (I should have just said Vampire Diaries)

This show hooked its hands under my armpits and lifted me up off the ground like a surprising new friend who's amiable enough but a little too emotional. You hang out with them anyway, because that can be exciting and fun when it isn't bad.

I'm not caught up to the current season, I'm breaking into the sixth (6th), but I feel like we can call this one. All the beautiful people have such complicated problems, and they're all in conflict with each other and all of their claims are so emotionally just. You find yourself texting the acronym "TVD" to people and putting the word "so" in two capitol letters, multiple times, within the same message.

It's not scary at all. It's not even creepy, like an utterly straightfaced Buffy that asks fewer questions and puts more emphasis on coiffed hair and killer outfits. And the outfits are super killer.

I'm just never watching it and thinking: "I wish I was not watching this." The best part about the show is that I don't yearn for it, you can take this in at any pace, devouring or left alone for weeks at a time, and it's always just chock full of feelings. There's just always more turns, events unfold to reveal more history and we get to jump between multiple storylines with a large enough ensemble to keep it interesting when pairings get shaken up. It's late highschool/early college period vampy drama on the right side of complicated. As someone not usually inclined I couldn't help but scoff and say to myself things like "Well, that's a ridiculous plotline. But obviously you would want to get the magic immortality ring and use its abilities to stage a distraction for the werewolf-vampire hybrid, so I bet Mary is going to meet up with Greg, oh! He's going to tell her that Sally is a vampire now! OMG!!!1!"

If you can't let yourself get swept up in crap like this, you may have lost something, and you might invest in trying to get it back. This is harmless fun in massive supply and if you've tasted the delight of BBC soap opera and need more you might be surprised how much stuff there is out there aimed at this audience but created by the same people. It's weird that the vampire that remembers before America was a thing wants to scam on some highschool girl, but I'm watching it, so what does that make me? To be fair, though, it's only because he's exploring a connection from her to an equally antique undead woman he used to love and must suppress with arcane magicks for totally serious reasons with far-reaching implications. If we could ever tie off the vampire craze, I suppose The Vampire Diaries could be the way to do it. There's clearly respect due to the Anne Rice-verse here, and we're sort of meant to assume an Eduardian/Lestat cross. It's the show I think a lot of people wanted Twilight to be so badly they made those movies into a match for their needs. This is a re-roll of that, with the shiny element taken out and a few others put in. If you need still more after this, the spinoff series The Originals awaits, so #showhole will not pervade your entity entirely upon finishing. There is hope.

Watch The Vampire Diaries.