The Vampire Diaries vs The Originals: which to watch first, and the TVD seasons you can't skip before New Orleans
The Originals was built to welcome newcomers. The Mikaelsons arrive in New Orleans carrying three seasons of baggage, though.
The CW launched The Originals in 2013 as a spinoff of The Vampire Diaries, and the two shows ran side by side for years. That leaves newcomers with a real question: do you need 171 episodes of Mystic Falls before you can follow one family to the French Quarter? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that some seasons do a lot of the heavy lifting.
The short answer: TVD first, but not all of it
The Originals follows Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan), the vampire-werewolf hybrid, and his siblings Elijah (Daniel Gillies) and Rebekah (Claire Holt) as they get tangled up in New Orleans politics. All three, plus Hayley (Phoebe Tonkin), the werewolf at the center of the spinoff's first season, were introduced on The Vampire Diaries.
The series was designed so you could start cold. Reviewing the premiere for CinemaBlend in October 2013, Kelly West, who only vaguely remembered TVD, wrote that the show "offers enough catch-up and introduction to allow newbies to get on board." You can do it that way. You'll just meet a family halfway through a thousand-year fight.
The TVD seasons you can't skip
If you want the Mikaelsons to land the way they're supposed to, you need three seasons of The Vampire Diaries:
- Season 2 (2010–2011): Elijah arrives in episode 8, "Rose." Klaus takes over Alaric's body in episode 17 and gets his own body back in episode 19, "Klaus." This is also the Katherine season, and Klaus's curse drives the whole back half.
- Season 3 (2011–2012): The family season. Rebekah shows up early, their father Mikael's tomb is opened in episode 5, and episode 8, "Ordinary People," tells the Mikaelsons' origin story. Episode 13 brings out their mother, Esther, and the brothers Finn and Kol.
- Season 4 (2012–2013): Hayley turns up by episode 7, episode 16 starts setting up the twist, and episode 20, "The Originals," is the backdoor pilot that sends Klaus to New Orleans and reveals she's carrying his child.
Season 1 is the Elena, Stefan and Damon origin story, and the Mikaelsons aren't in it. If you only care about New Orleans, it's the one you can skip, as long as you're fine meeting Katherine with a little less context.
The Originals is technically a show about Klaus moving to New Orleans. Emotionally, it's season 3 of The Vampire Diaries with better accents.
The backdoor pilot vs the real premiere
Season 4, episode 20 of TVD aired on April 25, 2013, and The CW picked up the series the next day. The actual series premiere, "Always and Forever," aired on October 3, 2013, and it reuses footage from that backdoor pilot inside a new episode. So if you're going straight from TVD season 4, you'll see some scenes twice. That's normal.
The CW scheduled The Originals to follow the season 5 premiere of The Vampire Diaries, so from there the two shows ran in parallel.
Don't miss: Broadchurch US vs UK: David Tennant played it twice — and didn't know how the US version ended
Watching both after New Orleans
Once you start The Originals, you can alternate seasons or finish one show before the other. The overlap is light, with one exception: The Originals season 3 brings Stefan Salvatore to New Orleans in a crossover with TVD season 7, so watching those seasons side by side pays off.
The Originals ran five seasons and 92 episodes and ended on August 1, 2018. The CW ordered Legacies that May, centered on Klaus and Hayley's daughter, Hope, at 17. The family that showed up in Mystic Falls to break a curse ended up with a third show, and the baby from the backdoor pilot got her own boarding school.
Previously we wrote: A Love Other Than Yours: who ends up together after that finale?