Everything you need to know about the Legacies CW series

While The CW’s identity has practically become inseparable from its slate of interconnected DC Comics adaptations, the broadcast network has also been the home of another budding franchise. This Thursday, its latest installment is set to premiere. The Legacies CW series, created by Julie Pec, is a spin-off of the recently concluded series The Originals, which was a spinoff of Pec and Kevin Williamson’s The Vampire Diaries. Altogether, these shows about the supernatural bloodlines that gifted the world with vampires, werewolves and other fantastic beasts have been on the air since 2009. And with The Originals concluding in April and Legacies taking the torch on Thursday, this run won’t be interrupted anytime soon.

What is the Legacies CW series about? Who’s in the Legacies cast?

Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell), the daughter of the villainous vampire Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) and the werewolf Hayley Marshall (Phoebe Tonkin), and the granddaughter of a powerful witch, is the first of her kind: a “tribrid.” That is to say, she occasionally demonstrates the powers (and failings) of all three supernatural beings.

So to better understand her abilities and their limits, Hope enrolls in the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted. Much like Charles Xavier’s school for mutants in the X-Men comic book series and films, or Hogwarts in the Harry Potter universe, Salvatore’s faculty endeavor to help their students understand and control their powers.

This includes former Mystic Falls High School history teacher turn Salvatore faculty member Alaric Saltzman (Matt Davis), a regular character from The Vampire Diaries and The Originals who finds himself teaching and protecting the very kinds of people he once sought vengeance against.

Yet despite all the baggage that comes with watching a spin-off of a spin-off, Pec and the writers have engineered it so that first-time viewers won’t have to do any homework before checking out the Legacies CW series premiere. The Hope character first popped up in The Originals, but Russell’s version is totally new. Audiences have never seen the tribrid at age 17, and her attending Salvatore is unlike any of the formats previously explored by the franchise.

What’s more, the X-Men and Harry Potter comparisons may prove helpful here as well. Most people these days are familiar with both franchises, be it the original books or the various adaptations in television and film, so the “going-to-school” dynamic utilized by Legacies should be recognizable to general audiences.

So even if The Vampire Diaries or The Originals have never occupied your television screen or your DVR’s queue, chances are good that Legacies will be a fun and easy watch regardless.