So much of what Vampire Diaries' fans love about the show was set up in that September 2009 pilot. This includes theories about Elena as well as which one of the Salvatore Brothers is actually 'the good one'. Of course, elements about the show that fans still aren't sure of, elements of Elena's character, also debuted in Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec's pilot. However, that pilot was almost very different. According to Entertainment Weekly, Kevin and Julie were forced to make some pretty notable changes to The CW pilot before it was released for public consumption. Here's what they changed and why...
Changing Perspectives And Making The Supernatural Known
Set-ups can either sink a story or push it towards greatness. Most of the time, the first chunk of a story bores the audiences as the writers are too concerned with exposition, the mundane elements of a characters life before the plot kicks in, or, worse of all, jump right into the plot without establishing a connection between the audience and the characters. Set-ups are hard. And that's precisely what Kevin and Julie found with the opening of their pilot, long after it was written, shot, and edited.
"I remember us feeling so excited when we saw the pilot for the first time and really feeling like we had something special," co-creator Julie Plec said to Entertainment Weekly. "Then I remember us screening the pilot for the first time at the research screening and it not being perceived as that special. And Susan Rovner at Warner Brothers [the company that owns the CW] basically made Kevin and me write that opening voiceover, which did not exist in the script or anywhere."
The problem that the Warner Brothers research team found was that Julie and Kevin's initial edit of the pilot felt more like an 'average teen soap' as opposed to a supernatural one. Although they weren't given this note when they showed Warner Brothers the script, the problem was apparent upon viewing it.
"What happened was: If you look at the first act of the show, it very much was your typical CW show: Young girl writing in her diary, she gets up, you meet the troubled brother, you realize the parents are dead, and the vampire did not show up until I think it was minute 8 or 11," co-creator Kevin Williamson explained. "When we tested the show for the first time, you know the moment when Stefan compels the woman behind the front desk? The testing score was dead until that moment, the first moment of something supernatural. Because until then, if you were watching this show blindly, you didn’t know it was a supernatural show. So Susan Rovner was like, 'You’ve got to let the audience know what they’re watching in the first 10 seconds. It will improve the test score.'"
Because everything was already shot, Kevin, Julie, and pilot director Marcos Siega could only do so much. So the idea of doing a voice-over to explain this supernatural element. The original thought was to give Elena the voice-over instead of Stefan. On top of this, the filmmakers used Vicki's attack as a teaser at the very beginning.
"That was all footage leftover from Vicki’s attack," Kevin said. "That was all just leftover footage and we put it together and we wrote that voiceover. Then we retested it and the minute he said, 'I am a vampire and this is my story,' the [testing] scale jumped up to the top. That was 30 seconds in and we’re like, 'Okay we’re picked up.' It was a testing trick to get picked up and we decided to keep it."
The Result Of The Pilot
The was no question about, the pilot changes that were made at the last minute ultimately secured the success of the show.
"We were all absolutely thrilled and couldn’t be happier with how it turned out," Nina Dobrev said to Entertainment Weekly. "Because it was the perfect mixture of teen angst and drama and suspense and it had that sci-fi element but it was still so grounded in reality that it just felt relatable despite the fact that it was set in a fictional sci-fi world."
Clearly, this was something the mainstream audience felt as well as the pilot had the largest audience of any show to premiere on the network to that date. This exceeded all the expectations both the co-creators and the network had for the show.
"I wasn’t quite sure what the ratings meant because it was the CW so the ratings were judged differently, but I do remember that [executives] Dawn Ostroff called, Peter Roth called, and they were ecstatic," Kevin said. "Then by the second and third week as it continued to hold and then people started blogging about the show and then when we unexpectedly killed Vicki, that’s when people really woke up and started to engage. You could feel it."
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