Both “The Originals” and “The Vampire Diaries” are headed to season finales this week. Both youth-niche CW dramas are social-media smashes, if not overall-audience ratings hits, and will return for new seasons in the fall. And both are under the supervision of Julie Plec.
Plec spoke at the Sync Up Cinema conference during New Orleans Jazz Fest 2014, dishing great career advice for would-be TV writers during an “Inside the Writers Room” interview conducted by Ashley Charbonnet.
“Pretty much every person dead or alive is in some kind of jeopardy over the course of the episode,” said Plec of “The Vampire Diaries,” which costars Covington native Ian Somerhalder and which reaches its fifth-season finale at 8 p.m. Thursday (May 15) on WNOL. “The question is, will the dead survive? Will the living die? Will Mystic Falls as a home in general stay intact for our heroes to return to and live happily ever after? And which heroes will be alive to do so? The stakes are enormous, and it’s super-emotional, and I cry every time I watch it.”
The New Orleans-set “The Originals,” a spinoff of “The Vampire Diaries” which reaches its freshman-season finale at 8 p.m. Tuesday (May 13) on WNOL, “has been building up all season to the birth of the baby (a vampire-werewolf-witch-whatever hybrid conceived by characters Klaus and Hayley), and what will happen, and what does that baby mean?” Plec said.
“It’s gut-wrenching, and it’s really powerful, and it’s the culmination of all of the villains that have presented themselves over the course of the second half of the season – the humans, the werewolves, the witches, etc.,” she continued. “They’re all making their move. Our Originals, who are usually so invulnerable, become very vulnerable. And it’s pretty beautiful.”
Plec visited New Orleans almost exactly a year after “The Originals” was ordered to series by the CW. A pilot episode was shot (mostly) here in early 2013, and later aired as an episode of “The Vampire Diaries.” In success came a doubling of work for Plec, solo creator of the spinoff (she co-created “The Vampire Diaries” with Kevin Williamson) whose earlier credits include “Dawson’s Creek” and “Kyle XY” and who was also attached as producer to the CW series “The Tomorrow People,” which the CW canceled Thursday (May 8).
“I had, as they would say, less than half a clue,” Plec said during a pre-Sync Up interview at the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Mostly because it happened so busily in the midst of working on ‘The Vampire Diaries.’ There was so much going on that adding another project into my head and onto my plate — I think my biggest hope was that it would work. It was the first thing I had done solo. There’s a daunting element to that, where you think, ‘Is everything I’ve ever done only good because other people did it with me?’
“Spinning off a show like ‘The Vampire Diaries,’ there’s a fear that you’re going to take a good part away from that show to make a second show, and not wanting to do any damage to the original show. I went in with very few expectations other than that. I had a lot to prove and wanted to make it great. Thankfully, and blissfully, from the beginning I was able to put together a pretty tremendous group of people on the writing side and on the editing side — some of whom I brought over from ‘Vampire Diaries,’ some of whom I didn’t — that made the job over a course of a year much easier than it could’ve or should’ve been.
“And then people liked it. The goal is, when you’re making a television show, don’t make it suck, make sure people like it, and try to stay on the air. So far, we’re three-for-three, which is good.”
Both “The Originals” and “The Vampire Diaries” are primarily shot near Atlanta. “The Originals” establishes its setting via both creative scenic design — a Conyers, Ga., street is dressed to look like the French Quarter for some exterior shots – and judicious use of footage shot on field trips to New Orleans. Cast members made two visits here for filming during the run of the season. Other establishing footage was collected as well, to be spliced into Georgia-shot sequences. Local musicians have also been featured.
“Mechanically, we made a wonderful discovery, which is that if we could come here a couple of times a year and just shoot really small, specific pieces, that we could fill the show with the proper New Orleans flavor,” Plec said. “I call them the pastiche pieces, because we like to put them together (to show) a streetcar going by, a pan up the cathedral steeple, a couple of tourists framed in front of a fountain, that kind of thing. And to be able to use those pieces to then cut into the stuff that we shoot in Georgia, it’s been fantastically seamless.
“I have friends who’ve shot movies here, who’ve spent upwards of a year here working, and they say they can’t tell sometimes what was shot where. For them it feels very authentic. I’m sure for people that live here, they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. That’s not real.’
“It gives the flavor you need. It sets the tone. The whole reason why we set the show in New Orleans was for that tone.”
Recent original episodes of “The Originals” have averaged about 1.5 million total viewers, a fraction of the audience totals drawn to Tuesday-night leaders “NCIS” (16 million on Tuesday May 6), “NCIS: Los Angeles” (14 million) and “The Voice” (11 million). But ratings tell only part of the show’s impact. More than 4.5 million Facebook users “like” the show, and more than 450,000 Twitter users follow and comment upon the demimonde doings of Klaus, Elijah, Marcel and the rest of the show’s paranormal characters on the show’s official account.
Even if largely simulated in suburban Atlanta, New Orleans is as much a character in the show as any of the leads.
Plec used her recent quick trip to New Orleans to soak up more atmosphere and story ideas, attending a late-night Jazz Fest show at Preservation Hall the night before her Sync Up appearance.
“I was looking around in the courtyard and in the building, and I thought, ‘Gosh, you know, our production designers are doing a really good job, because it looks like this,’” she said. “What we have built looks like what I see when I’m here. I stood in that space, caught up in the music, and all I could think of were more stories and more opportunities and, ‘Ooo, what could we do with another jazz band on our show?’ Today I walked by a street musician and took a picture, and she had a little website, and I sent it to our music supervisor and said, ‘Check this girl out. She’s kind of cool.’
“When you walk here, when you walk the streets, you feel like you’re in another world. As a storyteller, to absorb that world — and it’s the same for the actors — it makes you feel connected to it in a really great way.”
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