There is one common modern TV problem that never plagues “Vampire Academy”: The sense that a show’s first season is a bunch of throat-clearing, set-up, and teasing for future seasons. This is a series with a decidedly opposite problem; it’s so saturated with characters, lore, and incident that by the second episode it feels like it’s filling the audience in on a half-season’s worth of previous adventures that they already missed.
Presumably some of these details come from the “Vampire Academy” book series by author Richelle Mead, which was previously adapted into a little-seen 2014 film of the same name. At the time, it seemed like a natural blending of the two biggest contemporary fantasy franchises, filling the void left by the end of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” movies: a magical and competitive boarding school from the former, populated by hormonal/sympathetic vampires from the latter.