You don't have to have watched The Vampire Diaries or The Originals to enjoy the newest CW spinoff, Legacies, about 17-year-old Hope Mikaelson attending the school for supernatural children that Caroline Forbes and Alaric Saltzman opened in the TVD finale.
Creator Julie Plec told reporters just days after the first episode finished shooting that she and the writers have purposefully made the series accessible to newcomers.
"We are very deliberately setting out for it to be the easiest thing in the world in that most of what we’re drawing off of in terms of the past is in the form of Easter eggs and nostalgia placements," she revealed.
So if you're a TVD mega-fan, you'll feel especially tuned-in whenever the series references something from the past. But it'll still be entertaining for non-fans.
"We’d like to do the Miss Mystic Falls Pageant. We’d like to have a shout out to Founders Day. We’d like to have little character names sprinkled across our town square. But for the most part, the mythology is a new mythology," she explained. "A lot of the supernatural beings that we’ll be opening our doors to are things that you never would have seen on The Vampire Diaries. You don’t need to know anything other than just have a love for teen soap and/or creatures of the night, and then you’re pretty golden."
That means old characters will stop by — Matt Donovan and Jeremy Gilbert have already been confirmed — along with others in later episodes (Plec has an "open door policy" for anyone from the TVD universe).
As for Caroline, who is the mother of two of the main characters and a co-founder of the Salvatore School where the series takes place, she'll mostly be heard and not seen.
"We’re going to hear her and feel her a lot. I don’t know when we’ll see her. I, of course, would like to see her anytime. So the door is open wide [for Candice King to return]," Plec said. "But the girls are dealing with the fact that their mother, who has raised them, is a little absentee lately. They believe she’s off on recruiting missions, and Alaric knows that she’s actually off doing other things that have to do with the long term survival of their daughters. So the mystery of 'Where is Caroline? Why isn’t she coming home for their birthday?' is going to be part of our story, in the hopes that one day we’ll be able to have her walk through the doors as well."
Instead of TVD's traditional serialized story, the series will be more of a monster-of-the-week show, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
"There is definitely an overall big bad that we slowly hint at, but we’re doing something on this particular series that I have never done before, which is embracing — not always, but often — a monster of the week, and hence, the monster effects and special effects prosthetics and all that," Plec confirmed.
There's also a homage to Harry Potter. Explained Plec, "We have the History of Magic teacher that is no longer with us because he incinerated himself with hellfire accidentally in class, so now there’s a substitute. You just know the next History of Magic teacher is going to go painfully. And it’s just going to be, like, Defense Against the Dark Arts where they just can’t keep the teacher in place."
But there's also just plain old high school drama — especially in regard to the rivalry with Mystic Falls High.
"We’re having the best time with this. You know, our heroes of Vampire Diaries were the Mystic Falls High kids. Now, the Mystic Falls High kids are the townie a--holes and the Salvatore school rivals," Plec said. "Our kids at the school have to suck it up, because the single most important rule is don’t fraternize with the locals and don’t let anybody in on the secret of who you are or what you can do. And so, in the second episode, we had to do this annual flag football for charity against the local school. They have to lose every year. They have one job, and it is to lose spectacularly. But this first time, this bully and this mean girl are just poking and poking and poking, and our kids really have to control themselves. And, that, of course, goes terribly wrong."
Legacies premieres Oct. 25 on The CW.
