Following up his hit HBO show Six Feet Under, Alan Ball has plunged into a world of vampires in modern day society. Based on the books of Charlaine Harris, True Blood, premieres Sunday September 7 at 9 PM EST.
True Blood stars Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress living in backwater Louisiana who is telepathic. She meets vampire Bill Compton played by Stephen Moyer, whose thoughts she cannot hear, which attracts her to him. Bill has moved back to town to live in the house of his family; now that his last living relative is dead, he will inherit the property should the new Vampire Rights Amendment pass in Congress. In the larger world, vampires have revealed themselves, and a Japanese company has developed a synthetic blood drink, which allows the vampires to “come out of the coffin” and into normal society, since they no longer need to feed on people.
The world is fascinating and layered. The characters are interesting and drawn with great complexity. Sookie has the ability to invade people’s thoughts, though she has learned how to stay out of the heads of her friends and family, since it never felt right to her to hear their inner dialogues. She dresses provocatively for the tips, but is quite Puritanical in her ways, scolding her best friend Tara for using the “J-word” (Jesus) or for Lafayette, a cook at the bar where she works discussing female anatomy. I have not yet read Charlene’s books, but I can see why Ball was attracted to this world. The details are what make it work — HBO’s marketing has been brilliantly using some of these details, putting up posters shilling “Tru Blood”, the synthetic blood beverage vampires drink (and some humans, since the fake V-juice is like a powerful drug).
Interestingly, both the first and second episodes end in cliffhangers which are very effective. Narratively the first episode is slower because it is loaded up with all of the work of setting up the world. Thankfully most of the “rules” of vampires was saved for the second episode, which would have been very hard to get into the pilot. Ball has brought in Nancy Oliver (“Lars and the Real Girl”) who he worked with on Six Feet Under to the writing staff, which made me very happy indeed. The second episode really rolls along nicely, with great tension and dialog and a lot more humor than the first outing. By the end of the second episode, I was definitely interested enough to come back for the third.
I don’t know how the Moonlight or Twilight fans will feel about this show, but as a big fan of Buffy back in the day, I can say there’s a lot to like and admire. There’s also some really adult stuff here — a lot is made of sex with vampires and the drug-like effects of vampire blood on humans who drink it. There are a lot of political overtones, as the Vampires fight for equal rights in society. Writing wise, I found some clunky lines in the pilot, but overall the writing is solid and funny. If you watch it this Sunday, let me know what you think about it — will you continue to watch after seeing the first episode?
The photos in this post were taken by me with my Blackberry at the True Blood premiere party on Thursday night.
Posted under analysis, tv news
This post was written by Shawna on September 5, 2008
I couldn’t even watch ten minutes of this show before I had to shut it off. It’s not a very well written pilot. I might take a peak at episode 2 to see if they got over that or not, but this show looks like a loser to me.
True Blood resembles Heroes at first glance (just rented the first episode from Blockbuster), though it still feels mostly original… for some reason this show makes me want to eat Cajun food and drink cheap beer