Not Your Typical Mean Girl: Top Five Lydia Quotations from Teen Wolf

I know I’m late to the Teen Wolf party, but I am making up for my tardiness with my enthusiasm! The show is fun, soapy, and at times so over the top it feels like a fever dream. But, most importantly, Teen Wolf has brought Lydia Martin into my life, and for that I will be forever grateful. On first glance, Lydia comes off as a standard pretty, popular girl character: perfect hair and make-up, dating a star athlete, and a little bit mean. But the show gives you little glimpses behind that façade, like when Lydia somehow figures out that it is Allison’s birthday and breaks into her locker to decorate, or when she has perfect bowling form, or when she knows how to construct a Molotov cocktail using materials found in a high school chemistry lab. By the end of the first season, it is clear: Lydia Martin is a secret genius. Here are five of my favorite Lydia quotations.

Great Moments in Television: The Vampire Diaries

The Vampire Diaries season 1, episode 22, "Founder’s Day"

My decision to watch The Vampire Diaries was primarily based on nostalgia. Having read and loved L.J. Smith's books when I was in junior high, I was thrilled to see them having a rebirth both on the NY Times bestseller list and on the small screen. And only partially because it gave me many opportunities to exorcise my nerd rage in a health way by informing people who called TVD a Twilight ripoff, “Actually, these books were originally published in 1991, well before Twilight.”

The first episode was fine. Nothing I was too excited about, but good enough to keep me watching. But then it happened; sometime during the middle of the first season, I stopped telling people I watched TVD because I used to love the books and started telling them that this was THE BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION and if they thought they were too cool to watch it then they were MISSING OUT. All of this came to a head in the season 1 finale, when the show became so awesome, that even satirically self-described bastion of “critics/hipsters/snobs/douchebags,” the AV Club (aka, one of my favorite web sites) had to sit up and take notice.

Major spoilers ahead! (Although if you haven’t watched this yet, what are you doing? It’s on Netflix Instant and in case you didn’t hear me before, it’s SO good.)

VD and SC

Almost in time for this week's new episodes, here are my favorite parts from last week's Vampire Diaries and Secret Circle:

My Programs

I have finally watched both The Secret Circle and The Vampire Diaries from last week and am ready to reveal my favorite parts!  (Massive spoilers ahoy.)

ANTM Purple Dress Addendum

As a late entry to yesterday's post about purple dresses, here is America's Next Top Model: All Stars contestant Allison Harvard in a light purple bo-peep number.

Andre Leon Talley called it the best example of personal style he's ever seen.  And if the Talley says it, it must be so.

By the by, there is some extremely spoilery information on Allison's Wikipedia about this cycle.  Could it be true?

The Secret Circle Is Almost Here!

Speaking of things I can't wait for: The Secret Circle premieres on the CW on Friday, September 15!  Normally, I would be like any other fan girl, grousing that the show seems like it is not faithful enough to my beloved LJ Smith book series.  But The Vampire Diaries is so wonderfully entertaining that I have learned to Let Go and Let Kevin.  Smith, that is.  Do his thing, that is.

Was I upset that the Vampire Diaries TV show completely eliminated Meredith, one of my favorite characters from the book series?  Yes.  After two seasons of delightful, terrifying, exciting entertainment, do I still care?  Not so much.  I am hoping that The Secret Circle will be similarly wonderful so that I don't care about the characters that have been axed and the plots that have mutated.  And the trailer does look pretty exciting....  (But PS, don't watch it unless you want like the first couple of episodes spoiled)

Unfortunately, I can't embed it here, but I did take some wonderful screen shots that capture the flavor.

The Secret Circle Will (Hopefully) Be A TV Show!

In junior high knew that I was totally obsessed with L.J. Smith's Secret Circle books. Obviously I loved her Vampire Diaries, Forbidden Game, and Dark Visions books as well (I didn't read Night World until recently and I couldn't believe I had waited so long to read them), and no one was happier than me that the success of the Twilight series gave Ms. Smith a new surge of popularity. (Except maybe her. She was probably happier than me.) But The Secret Circle will always hold a special place in my heart. Witchcraft, hot boys, best friends, soul mates, and references to Greek mythology; what more could a girl ask for? And now, thanks to the success of The Vampire Diaries TV show and L.J. Smith's spot on the NY Times bestseller list, there is going to be a Secret Circle TV show!

Skins Series 5: Frankie

Everyone’s been making such a fuss about Skins lately. The MTV one, I mean. Unfortunately, everyone is focusing on issues of obscenity and advertiser pullouts and not, as Meredith Blake pointed out at the AV Club, the fact that the US version of Skins is not very good. It has the look of the UK Skins with none of the heart and guts. But you know what is really good? UK Skins, the new season of which premiered last Thursday.