True Blood: I don’t think vampires sweat, so they never have that shiny Southern glisten

Posted by Dan November 10th, 2008 at 12:03pm In True Blood

Perhaps it’s because I just got back from a movie about Swedish vampires, but now seems to be the right time to discuss the season thus far of True Blood.

When I last discussed True Blood, it was mainly to express my misgivings about the leaked series premiere. The show, for the uninitiated, deals with the emergence of a new “minority” — the vampire community, who have recently “come out of the coffin.” The action takes place in Louisiana, where sassy waitress Sookie Stackhouse (she also reads minds — fyi) falls in love with a dark, handsome vampire anticlimactically named Bill. She’s got an unpleasantly sassy best friend, a boss who’s in love with her, a sexy/stupid brother and a doting grandmother. And there’s also a murderer on the loose, but that fact normally takes a backseat to the fact that Sookie and Bill are having lots of hot and gruesome sex all the time.

Mostly, as I admitted, my ambivalence about the pilot was a product of my inflated expectations about Alan Ball’s next project. But now that I’ve adjusted my mindset a little, I can say with some certainly that True Blood is “reasonably entertaining.”

That’s my glowing endorsement.

What you kind of have to keep in mind is that this is basically a supernatural soap opera — not a serialized drama (there’s a difference). It’s dramatic, it’s campy and both hyper-sexual and hyper-violent. If you don’t like watching two people do the dirty-dirty while tripping on vampire blood and then follow it with a vampire vomiting blood on a woman until he disintegrates into a pile of goo, then this isn’t something you’d be interested in.

One of the things that works in True Blood’s favor — and is one thing that appears to have carried over from Alan Ball’s experience on Six Feet Under — is the show’s knack for pacing. Like SFU, True Blood is always juggling multiple plotlines, not resolving one conflict without starting (at least) one other.

Anna Paquin is strangely magnetic as Sookie, possessing a gap-toothed charm, while the rest of the cast is uniformely strong. One improvement the people behind True Blood have made on the pilot was recasting the role of Tara — Sookie’s pain-in-the-ass best friend. The previous actress (Brooke Kerr) played Tara as irredeemably angry, while Rutina Wesley gives her a bit more nuance — a cranky brat, but whose wide eyes prove she’s not wholly soulless.

I can’t say that True Blood will be a show to last the ages (although it’s already been renewed), but it’s easily the best new show of the season.