It’s always hard to be away from the ones we love, but with Covid creating stricter-than-usual protocols, some couples found themselves separated in ways they’d never experienced before.
That’s what happened to Shaun White when his girlfriend Nina Dobrev headed to Canada to make a movie. Due to those safety protocols, he was basically not allowed to see her at all. But thanks to the power of television, he could still spend quite a bit of time with her.
171 episodes of “The Vampire Diaries” time, that is — well, unless he only wanted to watch the episodes she was actually a part of. While the show ran for eight seasons, Dobrev stepped away as a series regular after six.
Maybe it’s because her character Elena Gilbert was, as White put it, “the love interest of all the guys on the show.” That’s a lot for any girl to handle.
White took to his TikTok over the weekend to answer fan questions, and that included if he’d ever tuned in to Dobrev’s signature series. As it turns out, he has, but maybe not while it was originally airing between 2009 and 2017.
In his defense, that was in the middle of his Olympics run, with the snowboarder appearing in five consecutive Olympics from 2006 until he announced his retirement after this year’s 2022 games.
Nevertheless, now that he has time to immerse himself in the bingeworthy supernatural soap, White declared, “I liked it. It was good.”
As he explained, Dobrev was set to be away for three months making a movie, so he decided, “Oh, this will be cool. I’ll start the show. I’ll see her without seeing her.”
What he didn’t expect was how completely sucked in (natch!) he would get to the vampiric saga, or the weird feelings it would give him.
Describing the series as “cool,” before getting “a little dark,” White noted that as Elena found herself getting entangled with all these different guys, “I found myself really rooting for them.”
It almost gave him an out-of-body experience, with the athlete musing, “Am I in the way?”
“I don’t know if that was healthy or not,” he laughed, “But I did watch the show and it was really funny.”
He wrapped his brief review of it by adding, “I can’t wait for Season 9.” A joke? Surely. But that shouldn’t stop some from hoping that he just dropped a major hint that the show could be due a revival.
Certainly, the franchise has yet to end completely on The CW. “The Vampire Diaries” begat “The Originals” begat “Legacies,” currently airing its fourth season. At the same time, The CW has been imploding its DC “Arrowverse,” with “Batwoman” and “Legends of Tomorrow” joining “Supergirl” in saying goodbye this season.
Only “The Flash” and “Superman & Lois” have been renewed for new seasons, with many speculating this will be a final run for “The Flash,” while “Superman & Lois” has only been tangentially related to the larger multiverse.
It’s expected that DC is moving toward more sophisticated — and bigger budget — superhero fare over on its own HBO Max, a la “Peacemaker,” which would leave room on The CW’s schedule for a lot of additional non-superhero programming.
Still, the whole future of the network is in the air with reports circulating that co-owners ViacomCBS and Warner Bros. are looking to divest their majority stakes in the network, or let it go altogether. As media giants are consolidating their portfolios into their own streaming services and wholly owned entities, this joint venture probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anymore — see Hulu becoming wholly owned by Disney in recent years.
Regardless of what happens with the future of “The Vampire Diaries,” though, at least White will always have the reruns. And fans can continue holding out hope that Season 9 could still happen someday. Everything else seems to be getting one!
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