A spinoff you could sink your teeth into. The CW series Legacies, which ran from 2018 to 2022, featured characters from both of its predecessors, The Vampire Diaries and The Originals.
The show followed teenaged orphan Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell), a descendant of some of the most powerful vampire, werewolf and witch bloodlines. Russell first began portraying the character on season 5 of The Originals in 2018. When Legacies wrapped in June 2022, the Wonder actress opened up about the shock of her journey as Hope coming to an end.
“I’m a totally different person now [than when the show began]. I think when I got the call that the show was ending, that really hit me, and my entire life just changed,” she told Observer.com at the time. “I’m 22 —five years is a long time for someone my age — and it’s just over like that in a phone call. It really hit me that I haven’t not played Hope since I was 17, and I look at where I’m at now and I am a totally different person.”
Although many Legacies fans were blindsided by the show’s May 2022 cancellation, series creator Julie Plec had been preparing herself for the news since a January 2022 conversation with CW personnel.
“The network called to basically say, ‘We don’t know if we’ll have jobs, or if we’ll have shows, or how much power we’ll even have to bring back the shows that we want,’” Plec recalled during a June 2022 interview with TV Line. “It was all up in the air, so they said to please plan accordingly, because there was a chance we wouldn’t know [whether we were renewed or canceled] until June. Because we were given that information, we were able to write a really nice completion to the arc of the season and make it feel like the end of the series without having to fret too much over it.”
The television producer added that she was grateful for the tentative heads up.
“Creatively, I’m thankful that we were able to bring this season to a close — not knowing if it would be the final close — in a way that’s satisfying and nostalgic and something we can all be proud of,” she told the outlet. “But this [show] should still be on the air, in my opinion.”
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