'Vampire Academy' Review: Peacock Series Sucks You in, but Doesn't Satiate

'Vampire Academy' on Peacock adapts Richelle Mead's hit YA series set in the rarified and stratified world of elite vampire society.

‘Vampire Academy’ Review: Peacock Series Sucks You in, but Doesn’t Satiate

‘Vampire Academy’Jose Haro/Peacock

Take the fairy-tale opulence and elaborate social rituals of Bridgerton and the class-revolution themes of The Hunger Games, toss in a warrior class à la the Dauntless from Divergent, add a light sprinkle of Harry Potter’s boarding-school shenanigans and just a dash of Game of Thrones’ endless power struggles, and you might cook up something like Vampire Academy, based on the YA series by Richelle Mead that hit bestseller lists right around the height of Twilight mania.

If that sounds like a lot to cram into one show, that’s because — for both better and worse — it is. Vampire Academy’s scope is massive in some ways, encompassing everything from the everyday angst of lovelorn teens to the tug-of-war between church and state for the future of the entire vampire realm, and its breathless pacing practically compels a viewer to keep clicking the “play next” button. But the more intricate its lore becomes, the more the entire thing threatens to buckle under its weight.

Vampire Academy

The Bottom LineEasy to binge but not quite satisfying.Airdate: Thursday, Sep. 15 (Peacock)
Cast: Sisi Stringer, Daniela Nieves, Kieron Moore, André Dae Kim, J. August Richards, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Rhian Blundell, Jonetta Kaiser, Andrew Liner
Executive producers: Julie Plec, Marguerite MacIntyre, Emily Cummins, Don Murphy, Susan Montford, Deepak Nayer, Jillian DeFrehn

And its lore does get intricate. Heck, it starts intricate. Created by Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) and Marguerite McIntyre (The Originals, Legacies), Vampire Academy unfolds in a tightly sequestered dominion pided between two different types of vampires. Comprising the royal and elite classes are the Moroi, who avoid sunlight and drink blood (without killing) but otherwise comport themselves more or less like old-money humans. Sworn to guard them with their lives is a class of vampire-human hybrids known as Dhampirs, who look and act even more like regular humans, only with enhanced fighting abilities. Both live in fear of the Strigoi, feral immortals who more resemble the fast zombies of Army of the Dead than either the Dhampirs or the Moroi.

Within that setting, the fierce friendship between Lissa Dragomir (Daniela Nieve), a kindhearted but sheltered Moroi royal, and Rose Hathaway (Sisi Stringer), a loyal yet outspoken Dhampir guardian-in-training, is regarded as unusual but not taboo. But after an unthinkable tragedy warps both their lives, the pair unwittingly find themselves entangled in a larger plot that has the potential to change everything about their society — which, as reflected in pretty sets that combine crumbling old-world glamour with sleek neon lighting, is currently caught in a tug-of-war between tradition and progress.

Mead’s books have been translated for the screen once before — as the 2014 film Vampire Academy, which, despite what should have been a star-making lead performance by Zoey Deutch, ultimately drowned in its own convoluted backstory. This adaptation confronts the same issue, and fights back with velocity and volume. So forbidden romances that might have taken up whole seasons on other shows blossom, wilt and blossom again in the space of three or four episodes, while key characters and concepts are still being introduced midway into the ten-episode season. (The first eight installments were sent to critics.)

At its best, this approach recaptures some of the same junk-food addictiveness of Mead’s books by serving up a veritable smorgasbord of storylines. If you’re not invested in watching the Queen (Pik Sen Lim) scheme with her top advisor (J. August Richards’ Victor Dashkov), perhaps you’ll swoon over the PG-13 romances, or thrill to the frequent battles against Strigoi invaders, or get caught up in Rose and Lissa’s dawning realization that all is not right in their inherently unequal culture. There’s so much ground covered in each chapter that most of them feel longer than their 50-ish minute run times, but you’ll never finish one complaining that nothing happened.

However, Vampire Academy’s propulsive pacing also precludes it from achieving much depth. Without enough buildup, developments that should land as major twists often breeze by before we have time to fully process them. Without enough room to breathe, characters we’ve invested hours in can come across like perpetual-plot-motion machines rather than real people — although some of the cast do fare better than others in this regard, particularly Stringer as the prickly Rose, Kieron Moore as her brooding (and frequently shirtless) instructor/crush Dimitri and André Dae Kim as Lissa’s sad, sensitive love interest Christian.

Meanwhile, the expansiveness that looked so exciting at first starts to look patchy up close as basic questions pile up. It’s well and good — and depressingly relatable — that Vampire Academy’s most prominent overarching theme is the frustration its young characters feel with a society that seems resistant to truth and transformation, even at the threat of its own existence. But what is that society? Where, geographically, is this realm? How far are the characters meant to be traveling when they go between its provinces? How big is the school our teenage characters are attending? Where does everyone else live?

In fairness, some of the head-scratchers seem to be planting seeds for future storylines — like the mystery of what exactly the Moroi are meant to be doing with their Avatar: The Last Airbender-esque elemental powers beyond showing them off for ornate ceremonies. Collectively, though, they result in a universe that feels flimsier than it should. The show seems to want to have it both ways: to suck you into its sprawling world, with its endlessly complicated lore, while hand-waving over the world’s basic details. There are worse problems for a series to have than a surplus of storylines and ideas, and Vampire Academy’s excess does often make for a tasty binge. It’s just not always a totally satisfying one.