Peacock
Julie Plec knew more than a decade ago that she wanted to adapt Vampire Academy into a TV series—and even back then, she knew she wanted to do it with her friend and Kyle XY colleague Marguerite MacIntyre, who later read the books while the two were on vacation together. It wasn’t the right time then, but in a post-Twilight and True Blood and Vampire Diaries world—and in the wake of a dismal 2014 film adaptation—the castle door has swung open. (Literally, in fact: Plec and MacIntyre’s Vampire Academy, debuting Thursday on Peacock, was shot in a castle in northern Spain’s Basque Country.)
As the chief mastermind behind The CW’s Vampire Diaries television universe (which also comprises The Originals and Legacies), Plec uses the vampire genre to explore universal topics like loss and trauma through a teen soap lens. MacIntyre, who starred in Plec’s Kyle XY and Vampire Diaries, first joined her friend in the writers’ room during The Originals. The pair’s new Peacock project attempts to put a new twist on a well-worn genre—one that, as Plec herself admits, might have hit an existential crisis.
Speaking with The Daily Beast ahead of Vampire Academy’s premiere, Plec noted that although any vampire story will contain its own creative flourishes, the central dynamic has historically been the same: “What we all know about vampires, and what we historically have loved about vampires in fiction and television, is that seductive, primal, sensual, and deeply sexualized predator.” But those tropes apparently don’t work as well with younger, more socially conscious audiences.