Even though Nina Dobrev will be saying farewell to The Vampire Diaries on Thursday night, CW President Mark Pedowitz believes the show still has many more seasons to come.
“It’s going to be much more focused on the brothers, Damon and Stefan, [with] a lot of places for both Kat Graham and Candice [Accola’s] characters to come out,” he told reporters ahead of the network’s upfront presentation. “We believe that with Julie Plec at the helm and Caroline Dries running the show that we will have a show. Most of this year has been getting to the point where we could have a reset knowing that Nina was leaving, so they’ve done a great job. We’ll see.”
For Plec’s part, she recently told EW it was never the plan to end the series when Dobrev decided to exit. “I’ve been getting a lot of heat about [why we’re not just ending the show], but it never occurred to us,” she said. “Not because we don’t think the character is vital to the show, but because we think that losing the character from the show actually creates a tremendous amount of emotional opportunity and story for all these other characters that we love just as much.”
And Pedowitz looks to a similarly-themed show as proof The Vampire Diaries could run for years to come. “We had a show run 11 years based on two brothers called Supernatural, so I have great confidence that this could happen the same way,” he says.