Critical Condition: Legacies

Legacies | TVNZ OnDemand, from Friday

☆☆☆☆ “Julie Plec borrowed from Twilight to make The Vampire Diaries on CW. That show was such a hit, it spawned the spinoff The Originals. Now she cribs from the Harry Potter and X-Men franchises in her latest spinoff, Legacies, about a school for the cursed. The new series features several characters from both series, and the pilot introduces several more hormonal, hexed and hexing teens … Legacies establishes its world fast. This is a supernatural Riverdale.” — Boston Herald.

☆☆☆☆ “Both Vampire Diaries and The Originals, although they began with their basic dramatic structures in place, grew and deepened pretty fast. Legacies has more room to grow and has much more need of swift deepening than either show. Legacies isn’t good enough for me to recommend to a viewer starting here from scratch, but it moves at a brisk clip and has the general feel familiar to fans of this storytelling world and there’s reliable comfort in that.” — The Hollywood Reporter.

☆☆☆☆ “It’s slickly produced, but it all comes back to a formula that CW has mined a few times too many, where raging teen hormones are further complicated by extraordinary abilities. Granted, vampires are undead, but it might be time for them to at least take a bit of a rest.” – CNN. 

☆☆☆☆ “One reassuring thing about Legacies is how much witches and werewolves are just like us, or at least The CW version of us. Much like the network’s other supernatural rehash, Charmed, the kids walk around spouting stuff like ‘Your binary assumptions about human sexuality are out of date!’ And in an attempt to paint the show with a baby-I-was-born-this-way ethos, Legacies makes much of how the school is a safe space for ‘different’ kids, as if sleeping in a coffin and sucking blood from the throat of terrified strangers are the same things as being gay or transgender, or that werewolf kids get bullied a lot by brutish human children.” — Reason.