The Vampire Diaries. 8-9 p.m. Thursday. WSFL-CW 39.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Cute but alienated teenage girl is strangely attracted to the cute but quiet new kid at school. They bond to overcome the typical problems of adolescence, like absent parents and the urge to sleep in a coffin and drink blood.

No, it's not Twilight -- but it's not bad, either. The Vampire Diaries, The CW's new fang-gang drama, successfully hitches the sanguinary sexuality of the vampire ethos to the in-group/out-group dynamic of the teen soap. And much as it might seem like a blatant Twilight ripoff, The Vampires Diaries is adapted from a series of young-adult romance novels written a decade earlier.

The show kicks off a few months after two small-town Virginia teenagers have lost their parents in a traffic accident. Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev, DeGrassi: The Next Generation) is lost in her grief, while younger brother Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen, Everwood -- and the grandson of that Steve McQueen) has taken up the intense study of chemicals, not the kind you get in the school lab.

But Elena perks up with the arrival of a darkly handsome new kid in town, Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley, American Dreams). In the grand tradition of the vampire tale, nobody notices that his arrival coincides with somebody turning the townspeople into an all-you-can eat buffet. But don't worry, it's not Stefan, even though he is a 150-year-old vampire. His brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder, Lost), however, may be another matter. Worse yet, Elena is a dead ringer, so to speak, for the girl at the center of the love triangle that got them into trouble way back during the Civil War.

In less capable claws, The Vampire Diaries might easily have been an unwatchable blend of the worst of its two parent genres. (As a teacher warns a vacuous student, in one of several lines in which the show gently needles itself, ``Cute becomes dumb in an instant.'') But creator Kevin Williamson, a veteran of Dawson's Creek and the Scream movies, juggles long soulful looks and sharp wooden stakes in just about the right proportions -- and keeps the show recognizable to fans of the novels. Only significant change: Elena's BFF Bonnie (Katerina Graham) has changed from a white descendant of the Druids to a black descendant of the Salem witches. Ahhh, diversity.

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