Credit: The Vampire Diaries/The CW
What started simply on The CW with The Vampire Diaries eventually became complex and long-winded with two additional spinoffs that followed the original vampire franchise on The CW, The Originals and Legacies. Before Arrow and the Arrowverse dominated The CW, until their recent cancelations, shows of the supernatural genre like The Vampire Diaries reigned supreme on The CW. As The Vampire Diaries has been one of the older CW shows, it came from a sensible position that the series was revived through other series since the original series ended. Below, we’ve detailed The Vampire Diaries Universe and its shows, The Vampire Diaries and its spinoffs, The Originals, and Legacies.
Credit: The Vampire Diaries/The CW
The Vampire Diaries
The first series, The Vampire Diaries, followed the life of a teenager that lost both of her parents in a car crash in Mystic Falls, Virginia, a town loaded with the supernatural that has constantly surrounded her as she falls in love with a vampire and falls into the vast realm of the supernatural firsthand. The Vampire Diaries, the start of the media franchise dubbed The Vampire Diaries Universe, is similar to the Arrowverse, the MCU, or DCEU, which connected events from each show together for a seamless transition across all of its media. While The Vampire Diaries Universe may not be as significant in scale or even fan perspective compared to Marvel or DC, the show still had a vital place in fans’ hearts, as seen from the total of three series that premiered and lived on The CW for over a decade, as the first series, The Vampire Diaries, started in 2009 and ended in 2017, while the spinoffs existed until 2022. The Vampire Diaries may have been the origin series for the entire media franchise on The CW, the original piece of work that inspired The Vampire Diaries and its spinoffs was a book of the same name, The Vampire Diaries. Characters from The Vampire Diaries appeared in the spinoffs, as we’ve detailed, The Originals and Legacies, but more importantly, Legacies as it and The Vampire Diaries were both on The CW at the same time, with new episodes at once.
Credit: The Originals/The CW
The Originals – First Vampire Diaries Spinoff
The Originals, the first spinoff of The Vampire Diaries and the second The CW show overall inspired by The Vampire Diaries book, premiered its pilot while The Vampire Diaries was still on the air, a month before the season four finale of The Vampire Diaries aired. While the pilot episode was a backdoor pilot and was a standalone entry, the series premiered its first official episodes as part of its first season later that year in October. As The Originals and The Vampire Diaries were on at the same time, The Originals ended one year after The Vampire Diaries, but the end of The Vampire Diaries led to the standalone series of The Originals. Unlike The Vampire Diaries, The Originals followed a more supernaturally inclined group in New Orleans, Klaus, Hayley, and others, as they dealt with events directly tied to The Vampire Diaries group is referred to as The Originals, as they are the first and original vampires.
Credit: Legacies/The CW
Legacies – Second Spinoff
Although The Originals only ended on August 1st, 2018, Legacies premiered its first episode in 2018 on October 25th, which showed that the series had been well thought out, and each of them was timed with the last damn near perfectly. Unlike the previous shows in The Vampire Diaries Universe, Legacies had a run on The CW entirely by itself, with no other spinoff or show within its shared universe on television simultaneously. As we’ve detailed that the original series, The Vampire Diaries, was inspired by the book of the same name, the spinoffs we’ve detailed were more of a mix of the original work and The CW media franchise. Legacies, the most simply titled series in The Vampire Diaries Universe, followed the daughter of Klaus and Hayley, characters from the previous The Vampire Diaries series, The Originals, as we’ve detailed, as she has been enlisted in a school to help the supernatural control and harness their abilities. The show Legacies was the shortest-lived series out of every series we’ve detailed in The Vampire Diaries Universe, including The Originals, which had an even shorter run than The Vampire Diaries. The show Legacies was also the only show out of the three Vampire Diaries Universe series that finished its final season with more episodes than every other season, while the earlier shows, The Vampire Diaries, and The Originals, ended their final seasons with their most minuscule amount of episodes.
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