It's been two years since The CW—or, as we now call it, "the flaming remains of The CW, with some Jesus hanging out in the crater"—announced that it was ending Julie Plec's Vampire Diaries spin-off Legacies with its fourth season. That cancellation ended a pretty remarkable run of TV: Plec oversaw fully 13 years of Vampire Diaries on television, running from the original series, through its first spin-off The Originals, and then through Legacies, which featured a mixture of old characters from both prior shows, as well as a new generation of kids spawned by the various former-twentysomethings who had cycled through its roster.
Now, Plec is opening up about the cancellation of Legacies, and, yeah, she still sounds pretty miffed about it, since the show's ending was pretty clearly a consequence of the sale of the network, rather than things like "Do people still like watching and making this). (Legacies didn't do crazy-good numbers or anything, having brought in about 400,000 viewers per week in its final season, but it wasn't outright dire for how other shows on the network were performing at the time.) Talking to Deadline, Plec—who's got a new show, We Were Liars, in development with Amazon—let fly some mild vitriol at the powers that be. "I was not entirely pleased with that decision," Plec says of the cancellation. "There had been a Vampire Diaries show on the air for 13 years, and it seemed unfathomable to me that the studio wouldn’t want to keep that show going as long as humanly possible, knowing that we had plans in our minds for more spin-offs and more ways to keep the world going."
Highlighting the show's ongoing support from CW president Mark Pedowitz, who ran the network from 2011 until its sale to the Nexstar Media Group in 2022, Plec basically says she could have kept this sucker going forever, if allowed:
It was a pretty seminal moment in my career when I realized that often just the unpredictability of the business and the metrics of the business can get in the way of a creative journey, no matter how much people like your show, no matter how much the people who hire you to make it, enjoy the process. If there’s a business reason to let it go, then people let it go. I was kind of sad and surprised at that decision, as was Mark Pedowitz, by the way, very vocally. And wish it didn’t have to happen that way, because Legacies, in particular, I felt like was designed to go on for many, many years, and have new generations of cast come through. It just felt like an incredibly short-sighted missed opportunity all around.
Alas, the supernatural soap opera had to end somewhere (i.e., in the complete collapse of The CW's entire scripted programming slate). We Were Liars is currently in production; Vampire Diaries star Candice King is set to co-star.
