Pilot Review: Legacies

Legacies (CW)
Premiered October 25 at 9pm

If anyone said the vampire or werewolf craze was over, they were wrong. Here we have an interesting specimen – a show that uses preexisting pop culture to explain away much of its content to draw inspiration and explain its particulars. I think I’d enjoy this show a lot more if this school was for mutants rather than witches, vampires, and werewolves, but there are plenty of struggling superheroes on other shows, so I guess this is what’s hot. Having them play a version of real-life Quidditch in a purposeful nod to Harry Potter is obviously an attempt to drum up comparisons between this show and that franchise, though this one is darker and less creative. Lines like “I am an equal opportunity evil temptress, your binary assumptions are dated” try to make it seem hip and modern, and following them up with “Are you going to stuck me dry or not?” reveals this show for the overdone, oversexed fare it really is. It should have been evident at the very start that Landon was a supernatural being, and they should have tried to figure out what his powers were instead of trying to wipe his memory repeatedly. The only actor I recognized was the one who played Alaric, and a visit to Matthew Davis’ IMDB page reveals that he played Warner in “Legally Blonde.” There are no real standouts among the rest of the cast, and this feels like a show I’ve seen many times before that just doesn’t interest me at all.

How will it work as a series? It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise – though I didn’t realize it – that this is a follow-up series to “The Vampire Diaries” and “The Originals,” both of which enjoyed long and successful runs on the CW. That world is obviously popular, and this one at least had a twist in the form of its supposed human hero turning out to be the number one villain.
How long will it last? The reviews are decent if not spectacular, pretty much on par with or a little less enthusiastic than other recent debuts on the network. Its ratings were somewhere in between, and given the popularity of its source material, I think this one is likely to earn a renewal.

Pilot grade: C-