"True Blood" Makes HBO Hot Again
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
Alan Ball’saggressively unique vampire drama True Blood landed in the win column even before its Sunday debut on HBO, if only because it has people excitedly talking about the pay-cable giant again. Much time has passed since anyone used the term “appointment television” to describe its series programming, but after taking a tumble with John from Cincinnati and Tell Me You Love Me and then suffering significant production delays due to the Writers Guild of America strike, HBO suddenly has its buzz back, at least among the chattering critics and eager entertainment reporters who were boundless in their praise of The Sopranos, Sex and the Cityand Six Feet Under.
Now we’ll see what HBO’s subscribers have to say.
Based on the bizarrely breezy Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, and supported by the most original online marketing campaign since the one that helped make The Blair Witch Project the most successful independent theatrical release of all time, Blood stands out as a television series unlike any other that has come before in the horror or science-fiction categories, including vampire-rich genre mates Dark Shadows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. At times it feels like a love poem to the violent and exploitative drive-in movies of the Sixties and Seventies, but Blood is ultimately too smart and too handsomely produced to be spoken of in the same breath as pop-culture trash, even the grisly good stuff.
For those who haven’t read Harris’ work, the Blood back-narrative goes like this: Vampires have come out of the coffin, so to speak, following the invention and distribution of mass-produced synthetic blood that slakes their ghoulish thirst for the human variety. But theirs’ is not a smooth transition into decent or indecent society. With fresh (if dead) meat available in abundance, a sordid sub-culture of horny humans rises up to indulge in a nasty new fetish: Sex with the undead, punctuated by puncture wounds that are the worst kind of love bites. Sometimes the vamps aren’t content with quick nips and sips and get carried away, making these atrocious attractions unexpectedly fatal. (In the world Harris has created, it takes more than a good hard suck to turn the living into the undead.) Vampires face their own dangers, as well, including discrimination by extreme religious groups (“God Hates Fangs,” they say) and a growing demand for vampire blood as an exciting new drug, especially among men in need of sexual performance enhancement.
That’s the background. At the forefront of it all is the central character in Harris’ books, pretty young Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress who toils at a remote bar in the backwoods Louisiana town of Bon Temps and who also happens to be a psychic. Enter Bill Compton, a 173-year-old vampire who looks 30 and has deep family ties to the region. For Sookie, who is driven to distraction and unable to pursue romance (or sex) because of the endless chorus of voices in her head, it is love and lust at first silence when Bill walks into the bar and she realizes she can’t hear his thoughts.
In starting up his new series, Ball has skillfully expanded most of the characters in Harris’ first book while adding a few of his own, some of them big fun, others shockingly stereotypical. (You’ll know them when you see them.) As a result there is an awful lot going on in True Blood, and while it isn’t difficult to follow, there are so many shifts in tone as all the different stories on its blood and sweat soaked canvas play out that viewers may find themselves wondering who (or what) Ball is targeting as its likely audience. Teenage girls could be drawn to the forbidden-romance thing, but only if they aren’t otherwise obsessed with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, which cover similar territory. (A feature film adaptation of the first book is coming later this year.) Teenage boys might get off on the violence and all the naughty bits and bites, but they’re likely to drift away during the love story and other plotlines. Adult women would seem to be the prime target, given all the time devoted to love, sex, romance, desire and longing, but Blood is not without sequences of excessive violence against females, sometimes of a sexual nature. They could be a total turn-off. (There is a shocking scene at the end of episode one in which a woman is brutalized to within an inch of her life that may be too disturbing for many viewers. It’s true to Harris’ story, and it leads to a crucial plot development in the second episode, but it is hard to watch. In addition, the central mystery finds women who indulge in their sexual fantasies being murdered. Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’ve had my fill of violence against women in popular entertainment and I was distressed to see so much of it here.)
Despite these concerns, Blood is the most exciting and compulsively watchable HBO drama since Deadwood, and it features the sexiest cast of any new series this fall, including Anna Paquin as Sookie, Stephen Moyer as Bill the vampire and Ryan Kwanten as Sookie’s over-sexed party- boy brother, Jason. This series will surely do well On Demand and on DVR, but it has the potential to become one of those shows one must watch at the time of its first telecast so that it may be discussed in detail the following day. That makes it a perfect companion for the new season of Entourage, another essential water-cooler series (and much-improved over last year if the first four episodes provided for preview are any indication). New episodes follow Blood on Sunday, and if you aren’t primed and ready to talk about them on Monday you probably shouldn’t be working in or around the entertainment industry.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
