Undead on Arrival
By James Poniewozik
Like most HBO series, vampire drama True Blood (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.) has a fantastic title sequence. To the tune of Jace Everett's dark country single Bad Things, images of death, lust and religious frenzy flash by. A woman writhes in black lingerie ... a preacher lays on hands ... a Venus flytrap snaps shut on a frog. It's a fever dream of Eros wrestling Thanatos in the middle of a tent revival. Damn! I think. I want to see the show those titles are for.
And maybe someday I will. Alan Ball (Six Feet Under's creator) is adapting a series of novels by Charlaine Harris with a seemingly can't-miss premise, given the current rage for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books: What happens when the undead try to integrate into mortal society? But while writerly honor forbids me to use a "suck" or "bite" joke, the early episodes of True Blood are, shall we say, drained of interest.
True Blood's vampires have "come out of the coffin" since the Japanese invented synthetic blood (sold as Tru Blood [sic], in six-packs). Humans are skeptical that they've really been taken off the menu--antivamp hate crimes abound--but they're also fascinated. There's a subculture of "fangbangers" who crave vampire sex, and in a clever inversion, a brisk trade in "v," vampire blood, which intensifies the senses and acts like extra-strength Viagra.
Amid this setup we meet Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a small-town Louisiana bar waitress with her own supernatural issues. She can read people's minds, making daily life a minefield of too much information. When the bar gets its first vamp visitor, 173-year-old Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), she takes a shine to him, not just for his smoky looks or his undead-Confederate-soldier courtliness: to her relief, she can't read his thoughts. Their romance unnerves her friends and coworkers, though, particularly when women start turning up dead with twin puncture wounds.
So far, so tasty. But Ball's characters, living and dead, are caricatures. He once said the only meddling HBO ever did on SFU was to ask him to make it less conventional, and he could have used that kind of intervention this time. For a show about prejudice, True Blood is free with stereotypes: Sookie's sassy black friend, the flaming gay cook and sundry racist Juh-hee-sus-fearing rednecks. (When a boy sees Bill and tells his mother, "He's so white!" she answers, "No, darlin', we're white. He's dayd.")
True Blood makes little effort to rethink genre conventions, as HBO did with shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood. The vampires have spooky eyes and fangs that click into place. When Sookie reads people's minds, they speak in complete sentences. This last is a mechanical failure (that's not how people think, just how we're used to hearing it on TV) and an artistic one. In HBO's great dramas, unlike most TV, the characters don't tell you exactly what they're thinking. Was the world dying for an HBO show with no subtext? Take away the graphic sex, and True Blood could air on USA Network.
There are signs of the show the title sequence promises in Episodes 4 and 5, which dial down the heavy-handedness (trusting the audience to get, say, the gay-prejudice allegory without showing GOD HATES FANGS signs) and explore more intriguing corners of undead life (such as the curse of seeing your own mortal children grow old and die). As it happens, they're the work of writers other than Ball. Maybe what this Blood needs most is a transfusion.