The year is 2008 and Twilight just shocked Hollywood by outgrossing a James Bond movie at the North American box office. After the film industry spent decades obsessing over the preferences of their brothers, young women caused the revolution. Earlier in the year, True Blood became a breakout hit for HBO with a demographic skewing further in that direction than the dramas that previously defined the network.

The nuances of what made those properties successful were lost on Hollywood, who took a clear lesson: vampires. Sexy, sexy vampires.

The CW, at that time an American TV network aggressively aimed at young women, had to act swiftly. It was known for shows like Gossip Girl and 90210 — glossy series about rich teens getting into soapy problems. But it seemed the kids suddenly didn’t want wealth porn. They wanted vampires. Sexy, sexy vampires.

The network uncovered a largely forgotten series of young adult vampire romance novels that ticked all the boxes and handed them to Kevin Williamson, the writer behind the Scream franchise and Dawson’s Creek. Not wanting to run the show himself, he recruited his long time colleague and friend Julie Plec to do most of the legwork. And thus The Vampire Diaries was born.

As one of the easiest slam dunks in TV history, it didn’t really need to do much to be a hit. Cast sufficiently attractive actors in the lead roles, put them in a love triangle or two, and boom, you have yourself a ratings success. But Plec and Williamson didn’t want to make that show. Williamson seemed more drawn to a cross between the teen love triangles of Dawson’s Creek and the twist-laden horror/thriller elements of his other work. Plec, meanwhile, loved teen genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and was interested in something in the same vein.

After a shaky start, The Vampire Diaries established itself as one of TV’s delights in the second half of its first season. It wasn’t exactly built on solid ground, and some of the supporting characters weren’t really filled in, but it could put the pedal to the metal on its plotting and create an almost intoxicating thrill. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg noted, “you could count on The Vampire Diaries doing two or three absolutely crazy things per episode, going to mid-episode commercials with the sort of cliffhangers or twists most shows would save for the end of a season.

“To watch the show in those seasons was to sit with one's jaw regularly agape as characters died or reversed moral direction and did things that seemed impossible for the writers to fix or live with, but the writers found ways to make nearly every wacky or bizarre choice land.”

High octane shows like this are only built to last for so long before burning out, and The Vampire Diaries lost its heat around halfway through its third season. It’s not really anyone’s fault so much as the show was always built on unstable foundations. But this didn’t stop it continuing to be a big hit for The CW, earning itself a spinoff in The Originals that ran for five seasons. When both the mothership and the spinoff came to a close, it made obvious financial sense to keep the franchise alive with a third entry.

Brand extensions like this aren’t supposed to be good. No one would’ve batted an eyelid if Plec decided to just take an executive producer credit on this one and let the franchise gradually wear itself out. But that’s not how things worked out.

The difference between The Vampire Diaries and Legacies is that Plec has a sole created by credit here, with Williamson onto other projects. It’s as though Plec had a big box of toys she intended to use on Vampire Diaries that Williamson said no to. Most of them are borrowed from Buffy or Harry Potter (without such a transphobic writer) but hey, those things were good, and great artists do steal, after all.

Legacies came with 262 episodes of serialised genre TV baggage, but the best early decision it made was to cut straight through that. If you can grasp the concept of “there’s a ton of supernatural shit in the world”, you’re good to go. Think Russell T. Davies’ approach to reviving Doctor Who. The set-up is straightforward enough. The students at the Salvatore School, a boarding school for supernatural teenagers, deal with all sorts of magic and monsters and such.

While Vampire Diaries got most of its power from rapid plot progression, Legacies has a lot of strings to its bow. While Hope (Danielle Rose Russell, who really should be set for bigger and better things) anchors the ensemble, the show’s deep bench of characters can all carry an episode at this point. It’s been a problem for some genre shows, especially on The CW, in recent years that characters don’t feel distinctive, but Legacies had no trouble establishing nearly everyone as unique fairly quickly.

What helps centre the series a lot is the thing everyone else is afraid of: standalone episodes. It’s not just that Legacies’ embrace of the monster-of-the-week format alongside serialised elements lets the show have fun with different scenarios every episode. It’s that having a reliable procedural spine means it can bounce around different genres and tones with much greater ease, always having a sturdy structure to fall back on. Vampire Diaries had no safety net when it burned through plot, but this show has the solid foundations to fall back on. That should help it stay good for longer.

Just as I hoped it would, season 2 has doubled down on what was working and tightened up in places. Whereas the first year could lose track of Hope as its protagonist, with the twins Lizzie (Jenny Boyd) and Josie (Kaylee Bryant) often dominating proceedings, this year has been much better at balancing various castmembers. It’s increasingly leaning into Landon’s (Aria Shahghasemi) status as a fairly underwhelming male lead and finding some good depths. Only Rafael (Peyton Alex Smith) isn’t really clicking, and that’s a significantly higher success rate for this franchise.

In a strange way, Parenthood is the show Legacies reminds me of the most. The Jason Katims series borrowed everything from the family drama genre, bringing nothing original but recreating the classic tropes beautifully. Legacies applies the same trick on its mix of teen soap operas and monster-of-the-week genre shows (also an unoriginal combination). There’s nothing new here. You’ve seen all of its moves before. But it’s executing them at a really high level, and attempting things that modern TV has moved away from somewhat. There’s nothing quite like serving up the old favourites.