Check out this awesome interview with TVD & The Originals EP, Julie Plec. She talks about the “rules” in launching a spin-off, here she talks about respecting the fans.
Respect the old fans, but welcome new ones — introduce the characters as if we’ve never met them before. “If you are telling a story as though only the people who’ve spent the last five years watching your other show are tuning in, then you’re doing it wrong. But I will tell you, creatively it is one of the hardest things to execute. The audience could be somebody who’s seen one episode of The Vampire Diaries, zero episodes ofThe Vampire Diaries, or 89 episodes of The Vampire Diaries but can’t remember anything — how do you introduce these people and this world in a way that is exciting and understandable and palatable to a new audience when, specifically in our case of the fractured Original family, they’re hateful little minxes?” That’s particularly tricky with Klaus, who had two-plus seasons to earn goodwill among TVD fans, but who’ll be presented in the premiere as Elijah’s “potentially psychopathic brother,” Plec says. “You’ve got to find a way to say to the audience, ‘You need to care about Klaus because Elijah cares about Klaus’ — because Klaus is about to do some really nasty stuff, like be told he’s about to have a baby [with Phoebe Tonkin’s werewolf, Hayley] and say, ‘Kill it. I don’t care.’ That’s not a hero move in the first episode of a TV show.”
