Blood Brothers. Amy Rickman
Thus, on 20 January 1998, Dawson’s Creek was born.
The series was to be a landmark in television produced for teens. Apart from launching the careers of several young actors and actresses – Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson, Michelle Williams and James Van Der Beek (to name a few) – it redefined how teenagers could be portrayed on screen. The show’s trademark was its sophisticated language combined with its smart, open approach to the complex, real-life crises facing teens in their day-to-day lives.
Dawson’s Creek had a love-it or hate-it premiere! Some critics saw it as brilliant (an ‘addictive drama with considerable heart,’ said Variety) while others thought it vacuous and too risqué (‘I can’t get past the consuming preoccupation with sex, sex, sex,’ said the Cincinnati Inquirer). Regardless of the critics’ opinion, teens totally got the show and they loved it. It became the defining television series for The WB (which later became The CW) and firmly established Williamson as the go-to writer for smart, sexy teen dramas.
Of course that doesn’t mean that everything he turned his attention to turned to gold. When you produce something as successful as Dawson’s Creek, often it’s hard to follow up straight away with equal brilliance. Williamson was always going to be judged by the success of that one show. His next small-screen endeavours included Wasteland (1999), which was about a group of struggling twenty-something actors in New York. ‘I think it’s maybe a victim of expectations,’ said the show’s director Steve Miner after it premiered to lukewarm reviews and ratings. Wasteland represented Williamson’s first attempt to break away from the teenage voice. ‘I don’t think of myself as the voice of the teenage era and I never have,’ he told Entertainment Weekly, back in 1999 before he had embraced the fact that actually, he is! ‘I’m growing up as a writer and I hope adults will accept Wasteland because my goal is to appeal to that late 20s to early 30s age range.’
When Wasteland wasn’t the success he had intended it to be, Williamson moved on to Glory Days (2002), which was also known as Demontown and not to be confused with Glory Daze, the 80s-set college fraternity comedy. It had a horror/mystery feel to it, and only ran for two months. The premise was about a successful novelist whose bestselling novel was based on people from his small hometown. When he returns to try and overcome severe writer’s block, the townspeople are none too happy to have him back and mysterious, unexplained events begin to happen around him. Despite a relatively strong viewership at the start, interest quickly waned and the show was subsequently axed. Another television venture was called Hidden Palms, again involving a murder-mystery, this time set in sunny Palm Springs. After its initial eight-episode run, it too was cancelled. Meanwhile, Williamson didn’t fare much better on the big screen, with follow-up movies to Scream including Venom, Cursed and his first-ever directorial debut, Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999) – the payback script for that English teacher who once eviscerated his writing. In fact, he had to rename his original script, Killing Mrs. Tingle, after a string of high-profile real-life high school murders made it inappropriate and even then it absolutely tanked at the box office.
No, what Williamson needed was this new project called The Vampire Diaries – and thank goodness he had his collaborator Julie Plec on hand to persuade him not to get distracted by the Twilight connection and to keep on reading.
Plec and Williamson’s working relationship goes all the way back to Scream. ‘I was [director] Wes [Craven’s] assistant on Scream,’ Plec recalls. ‘It was [Kevin’s] first movie that ever got made, my first movie. I was 22, just out of college. We were two kids in a candy store, up in Santa Rosa, California, on location, making a movie.’
Plec moved to Los Angeles almost as soon as she was able. She always knew that she wanted to work in the movie industry and never had a plan B. ‘I think that’s why I survived,’ she admits. ‘If I had a Plan B, I might not have stuck with it through the bad times as long as I did.’
Her first job was as ‘the second assistant to an agent named Susan Smith,’ she told NiceGirlsTV, but she quickly realised that being an agent wasn’t for her. It didn’t involve enough creativity and so she only lasted in the job for three months. Then a friend told her about an exciting opportunity to work for the notorious horror-movie director Wes Craven, as his assistant. She took the job and it was to change her life forever – she was even the one who managed to convince Wes to direct the fun, modern horror movie written by a nobody in the industry called Scream. It was like fate. All of a sudden, Plec found herself working with ‘every young hot star of the moment and a crew that became my LA family.’ Most importantly, she met and instantly connected with the young writer of the film, one Kevin Williamson.
The two became firm friends. ‘We used to sit up on night shoots [during Scream] and sing Kenny Rogers’ songs and talk about our future,’ she said. It was this friendship that was to become one of the defining threads in the fabric of her career. She would collaborate with Kevin on other projects – mostly movies like Teaching Mrs. Tingle and Cursed (their werewolf project) – while she worked on her own shows. Yet her career-defining show pre-The Vampire Diaries was without Williamson: a teen television drama called Kyle XY (2006–09). It was the first time she really got to showcase her writing skills and worked on building a show from the ground up.
Kyle XY was about a young boy who is found in the middle of a forest with no memory of life before that moment and strangest of all, no sign of a belly button. He is adopted into the Trager family and gradually discovers that he has extraordinary powers. When the show debuted on 26 June 2006, it was to lots of hype and solid reviews, but ratings steadily declined throughout the running time and it was eventually cancelled. The last episode aired on 16 March 2009, with many plot lines left unresolved. It meant that Plec and the rest of the Kyle XY team didn’t get to close out the show and wrap up the storylines as intended: ‘If I had any control over how and when Kyle XY ended, things would have been handled differently but I, like all of us involved with the show, had to stop when we were told to stop. It was disappointing, knowing that we couldn’t deliver a final chapter to our story,’ she admitted.
A special segment on the DVD called ‘Kyle XY: Future Revealed’ was included, in which the writers and producers talked about how they would have resolved matters, given the opportunity. Plec remembers the show with fondness: ‘I loved working on that show and the friends I made with the other writers, actors and producers are some of my strongest friendships still.’
Once Kyle XY had ended, she was at a loose end: she wanted another show, but she wasn’t sure what. She had been following the vampire trend – she was a die-hard fan of Twilight – and has a history of being drawn to the supernatural but then someone at The CW passed her a series of novels…
Just like the novels (read more about them on the Paul side), the idea for The Vampire Diaries’ show didn’t come from its creators, but from the network – The CW. The CW (‘C’ from CBS and ‘W’ from Warner Brothers, the two parent companies) was a relatively new network at that time, an amalgamation of TV channels UPN and The WB. UPN had aired shows such as America’s Next Top Model and Everybody Hates Chris, whereas The WB had hits like Dawson’s Creek, Smallville and Supernatural. Together, they had a mission to focus ‘intently on finding shows that would finally define The CW as a net for young people, especially younger women.’ (Variety). One of The CW’s first hits was with Gossip Girl (2007–), a connection that would lead to the network securing its biggest property yet.
The CW had bought the television option to The Vampire Diaries’ series in conjunction with Alloy Entertainment (who produced the novels) and were looking for the right writer/director/producers to bring the story to life on the small-screen. They told Plec: ‘We have a property that we’ve been dying to do. We absolutely want to do a vampire show, and we’d love for you to look at it.’ They wanted a vampire story as they hoped that the paranormal romance would prove the perfect complement to their already successful show, Supernatural.
Plec read the books first, and loved them. She told