- September 1, 2009 has a short story by Charlaine Harris about the Britlingens. Britlingens were introduced in All Together Dead of the Sookie Stackhouse series.
2009 Events
September 3 - 7: DragonCon - Atlanta, GA. - www.dragoncon.org
September 18: Mystery Matters web radio interview with Fran Stewart
October 14 - 18: Bouchercon - Indianapolis, IN - http://www.bouchercon2009.comOctober 27: Barnes and Noble Shreveport, 6646 Youree Dr. Shreveport, LA; Book Signing 7 pm
October 30: Vampire Ball - New Orleans, LA; 9 pm - www.endlessnight.com/vampireball/
October 31: Garden District Book Shop, 2727 Prytania St. New Orleans, LA; Book Signing 1 pm - www.gardendistrictbookshop.com
November 1: Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner - Houston TX; 5pm - www.chron.com/content/chronicle/ae/books/bookandauthor/2k/index.html
November 12: Darragh Lecture - Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), 100 Rock Street, Little Rock, AR - http://www.cals.org/
2010
March 24 - 25: Lecture at Shippensburg University - Shippensburg PA - www.ship.edu
April 16 - 18: WRW writer’s retreat - Leesburg, Virginia - www.wrwdc.com
April 28- May 2: Romantic Times – Columbus OH - www.rtconvention.com
October 14 -17: Bouchercon – San Francisco, CA - www.bcon2010.com
Lindsey Haun Joins the Cast of 'True Blood'
Publishing phenomenon Charlaine Harris and her Sookie Stackhouse series once again feature prominently on the August 9th New York Times bestseller lists. All eight mass market paperbacks, plus the latest Ace hardcover, Dead and Gone, will appear on the lists that run in next week 's New York Times Book Review. This may be a publishing record with an entire series placing on the list simultaneously!
Charlaine is fresh off a sensational trip to last week's Comic-Con International in San Diego, where she met fans and signed a ton of books. About 800 fans started lining up on Friday morning in hopes of scoring one of 150 tickets to Charlaine's afternoon autographing session. The excitement continued on Saturday with another autographing session with the cast and creator of HBO’s hit television series “True Blood” (which is based on Harris’ novels) and a panel discussion about the show in front of 5,000 cheering fans. Charlaine answered several questions and thrilled everyone with the announcement of a new three book contract, promising that Sookie Stackhouse's adventures will continue into 2014!
Berkley/ NAL’s dominance of The New York Times mass market bestseller list in 2009 continues, as its titles snare 11 spots – 55% of the list! – for the week of August 9th. In addition to the eight Charlaine Harris titles to hit the mass market list, three more titles from the Berkley/ NAL group also hold strong: Tailspin by Catherine Coulter (Jove) is #3 in its third week; Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva (Signet) is #4 in its fourth week; and Hidden Currents by Christine Feehan (Jove) is #17 in its fourth week.
“Nobody’s ever entirely happy to see her” character, Louisiana’s blood-sucker boss lady, Queen Sophie-Ann, says series creator Alan Ball. “She’s very powerful, capricious and most likely insane.”
Oooh, we love her already. So it’s a good thing she “has more than one secret agenda,” he teases, “which we will slowly become aware of over season 3.”
It's true love for "True Blood" co-stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer.
The real-life couple, who play lovers in the hit HBO vampire series, are engaged to be married, reps for both actors confimed to People.com.
Paquin, 27, will be playing stepmom to Moyer's two children – his 9-year-old son Billy and 7-year-old daughter Lilac – from a previous marriage.
Now with marriage in their future, fans of the co-stars can expect the chemistry on-screen to continue in the show's frequent nude scenes.
"Obviously, if you're already with that person then you're not having to sort of get over the 'Wow, I'm naked with someone that I don't even know the middle name of!'" said the actress.
As for Moyer, 39, his feelings are mutual: "My girl is hardcore."
L.J. Smith's "The Vampire Diaries" was first published as a trilogy in 1991. That was a full decade before Charlaine Harris published the first book in her Sookie Stackhouse series and 14 years before Stephenie Meyer first begin making vampires sparkle in "Twilight."
However, because of the variable journeys from page-to-screen, "The Vampire Diaries" will be premiering on The CW this fall and on Tuesday (Aug. 4), the show's producers and cast had to explain to the Television Critics Association how this latest uber-swoony undead romance is different from the ones filmed before it.
[Publication chronology aside, it would be disingenuous to claim that just because its source preceded the sources for "True Blood" and "Twilight," "The Vampire Diaries" isn't utterly and completely indebted and beholden to those burgeoning franchises.]
With much of the cast off filming in Atlanta, stars Paul Wesley, Nina Dobrev and Katerina Graham, plus co-creators Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec faced the comparisons.
Wesley, who has previously played werewolves and fallen angels, got the first query, regarding the influence of Robert Pattinson when it comes to brooding teen vampire archetypes.
"Well, prior to shooting the pilot, I had never seen 'Twilight,'" Wesley noted. "And I specifically went out of my way to not watch 'Twilight' because I didn't want it to in any way influence me because I knew that it was a similar subject matter. And now, I've actually never watched the movie in its entirety, but I've seen parts of it. And, you know, I don't think that it would be wise for any actor to make any judgments on their character or decisions based on anyone else. I think if there are similarities to Robert Pattinson's character in 'Twilight,' so be it. I take the scripts that Kevin and Julie write, and I do my honest, best portrayal. And then anything else — any, like, similarities, that's sort of an aftereffect."
Lest you think Wesley is diminishing "Twilight," the "Everwood" and "24" and "Wolf Lake" veteran added, "I was impressed because it has this — not to make this about 'Twilight,' but it has this super sort of youthful following. And I found it pretty engaging, so I was kind of relatively surprised. You know what I mean? I didn't think — I thought it would be a lot campier. I actually liked it, what I saw."
Williamson, who created the temporarily oft-imitated "Dawson's Creek" for the old WB admitted that the basic similarities are unavoidable.
"The premise is the same: you know, girl meets vampire," he noted.
This gave him pause when he was originally brought the books.
"I worried a lot," he acknowledged to the assembled critics. "I was like, 'Oh, God, we're the ripoff. That's so great.' No one wants to do that. And I actually said, like, 'No way.' And then we read the books. And Julie and I wanted to work together on a project. Julie and I have worked together on and off since 'Scream.' So we wanted to work together on a project. 'Kyle XY' was coming to an end, and I was just sitting around... Just tweeting. And so I was like, 'Sure, let's do it.'"
Wiliamson urges a little patience before immediately pushing "Vampire Diaries" aside as a "Twilight" knockoff, especially after the pilot.
"The pilot was very tough because it does have a lot of similarities to 'Twilight,' and there's no way around it," he said. "We had to introduce — we had the story as he comes to town, the first day of school. That is the book. So we sort of are telling it in sort of that fashion, but we're switching things around. Once we get into it and we can establish all the characters, which is what — you know, the pilot, we had 10 characters to get out in 42 minutes. It's tough. And so now we can get — sort of sit back and start telling stories on a weekly bases. Then it all changes. That's when you'll see the differences, because you're watching a weekly show. We're not a movie with a beginning, middle, and end. We're actually evolving, and we get to evolve and just tell the stories, and it just sort of unrolls."
That unrolling includes a closer look at the impact of a vampire incursion on a small town, especially a small town that begins to realize that it's got a vampire problem.
That actually brings to mind more of a "True Blood" tie and Williamson admitted that at a recent Comic-Con party, he and Dobrev stalked (and met) Alexander Skarsgard of the HBO hit. [This reporter was witness to this meeting-of-the-vampire-minds.]
This led to a discussion of the enduring fascination with vampires, particularly for female audiences.
Dobrev began by stating, "There is something about a man who lurks in the dark."
Plec added, "It's, to me in my head, if Jordan Catalano was a vampire or Dylan McKay, that naughty-bad boy that just... you want to believe, like in reference to Jordan, you want to believe there is so much going on behind those eyes. You want to believe that they have epic amounts of knowledge and soul and spirituality and intelligence lurking behind those eyes. And in the real men, you often don't get that. So in a vampire, just by definition you are getting the bad boy with the brain."
Does that sound right, Fangbangers?
Anyway, right or wrong, I'll give Graham the last word when she declares, "It's not 'Twilight.' It's not 'True Blood.' It's 'The Vampire Diaries.' It's completely different, and you'll have to watch it
"The Vampire Diaries" will premiere on Thursday, September 10 on The CW.
Sunday's episode of the pay cable network's "True Blood" brought in 4.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That's a record tune-in for the two-year-old show, and a stunning stat given just how few home HBO reaches vs. other broadcast and cable networks.
Indeed, "True Blood's" viewer tally was higher than the premieres of some much- hyped network shows, including Fox's "More to Love" (4.0 million viewers) and ABC's "Defying Gravity" (3.6 million).
The news was also good for the other shows in HBO's Sunday lineup. Both "Hung" (3.4 million) and "Entourage" (3.2 million) had their second-best ratings of the season.
Sunday's numbers highlight the stunning summer pay cable networks have been having.
First there were the books, three different series of neck-biter novels, bestsellers all. The Vampire Diaries , the young-adult series by L.J. Smith (five have been published, with two more on the way), centre on a teenage girl named Elena who falls for a hot bloodsucker named Stefan.
The Sookie Stackhouse series (also known as the Southern Vampire series), written by Charlaine Harris, features Sookie, a cocktail waitress in steamy Bon Temps, La., and Bill Compton, the courtly, 173-year-old vampire who alternately protects and ravishes her. (On the July 10 New York Times paperback mass-market fiction list, Harris's books held seven of the top 25 spots.)
And Stephenie Meyer's monstrously successful Twilight series details the chaste but super-deep love between the mortal Bella and the vampire Edward, high-schoolers in drizzly Forks, Wash. Two graphic novels based on Twilight are due soon from Yen Press, drawn by Korean artist Young Kim and closely vetted by Meyer. And yet another trilogy of vampire novels, this one from the film director Guillermo del Toro, begins with The Strain , about Manhattan vampires run amok.
Then there are the TV shows. Starting Sept. 10, The Vampire Diaries will become a CW series, produced by Kevin Williamson ( Dawson's Creek ) and starring Nina Dobrev as Elena and Paul Wesley as Stefan. Over on HBO, True Blood , the kudzu-shrouded, plasma-soaked, 18A-rated series adapted from Harris's novels by Alan Ball (who also created Six Feet Under and wrote American Beauty ), is currently number one. With Oscar winner Anna Paquin as Sookie and her real-life fella Stephen Moyer as Bill, the show, now in its second season, lures 3.7-million viewers every Sunday night at 9; with repeat airings and downloads, the viewership jumps to more than 10 million. The ratings have risen 85 per cent since the series premiered last September, and more than a million season-one DVDs have been sold since their May release (Amazon is already taking pre-orders for season two).
Finally there are the movies. Last year's Twilight , directed by Catherine Hardwicke ( Lords of Dogtown ) with Kristen Stewart as Bella and Robert Pattinson as Edward, has grossed $382-million (U.S.) worldwide. Fans devour daily updates from the Australian set of its sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon , directed by Chris Weitz ( About a Boy ) and due out Nov. 20. (One recent hot flash: Edward and Bella kiss in it OMG)
Also released in 2008, the Swedish film Let the Right One In , about an adolescent vampire named Eli and the troubled kid, Oskar, who befriends her, was a cult favourite, ending up on a number of year-end best lists, including the Toronto Film Critics Association's. According to IMDB, it's getting an American remake courtesy of writer/director Matt Reeves ( Cloverfield ), along with a dumbed-down American title ( Let Me In ).
And rolling out across North America this summer is Thirst, from Korean horror-meister Chan-wook Park, in which the love between a priest and a married shopkeeper gets even more complicated when he turns her into a vampire. (To promote the film, Focus Features sent critics a hospital-style blood bag full of fruit juice, complete with a straw.)
So there was plenty of bloodlust on display at last week's ComicCon convention in San Diego, Calif., the annual geekfest that draws about 125,000 fans – and almost as many Hollywood marketers eager to garner their support. Weitz brought clips fresh from the set of New Moon , Harris signed Sookie novels for 150 pre-ticketed worshippers, and folks from The Vampire Diaries TV show and the Twilight graphic novel shilled their wares.
Why are we going batty for vampires? For one thing, these are not your grandparents' monsters. Creepy capes and heavy hair oil are out; today's blood-suckers are ethereally beautiful. In Twilight , Edward and his “family” are the coolest kids in school, with the sharpest clothes and the hottest cars. When they enter the cafeteria (in slow-mo, naturally), they stop traffic, and when sunlight accidentally hits them, their skin glitters as if they swallowed a disco ball. In True Blood , the vampires are sexy beasts, all smouldering looks, tattoos and tight black leather. (Their sheriff, Eric, recently tore a victim's limbs off while sporting high-lights foils in his blond hair.) So many mortals flock to the vampires' bar, Fangtasia, to mate with them that they've earned a nickname: Fang-Bangers.
Another reason vampires are so popular: Their habits can be adjusted to suit any audience. The PG-rated night-crawlers in Twilight and The Vampire Diaries experience passion without sex. The vampire boys clearly desire the mortal girls, but they're all about respect and restraint and withholding. Edward doesn't want to rip Bella's throat out, no, he wants to lie in a forest and hold her hand. He doesn't even kill people – he's a vegetarian (meaning, he only sucks the blood of animals).
On HBO, however, everyone's getting well and truly laid, with plenty of nudity, high-speed humping, and close-up blood slurping.
As well, vampire stories often surface during times of economic or societal gloom, because they play to our worst fears and secret yearnings. On one hand, they personify the idea of dark forces at work, chaos beyond our control, hushed-up conspiracies poised to destroy us. On the other, who better to fantasize about during a recession than decadent hipsters with mansions, flexible morals and a really swinging nightlife? They're haughty, selfish, excessive – all things we can no longer afford to be. In Blue Bloods , a young-adult book series launched in 2007 by Melissa de la Cruz, the vampires descend from establishment families and attend a posh private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Just as we suspected: The rich are ghouls
Today's vamps are also eternally youthful, with no surgery required, which is why the fashion world has embraced them, too – recent magazine spreads and ads brim with pale wraiths sporting red lips, black-rimmed eyes and killer stiletto booties. All of which means that we'll be living with vampires, if not for centuries, at least through summer 2010, when the third Twilight movie comes out.
Vampires, zombies, the occult: Why such a sanguinary sell? When life is in tumult, pop-cult goes undead.
Pop culture is dripping, dripping, with the occult.
The book and movie of Twilight have become instant megahits, HBO's True Blood is one of the biggest shows on premium cable, and the novels of Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer are haunting the bestseller lists.
Werewolves, then zombies, then vampires take turns as movie monster of the month. Left4Dead, a zombie-hunting video game, has sold more than 2.5 million units since it appeared last fall.
The supernatural is everywhere, and a wildly popular genre has been loosed from the vault: the supernatural or paranormal romance.
Why? Troubled times seem to raise the dead.
"The genre of fantasy is the ultimate escape," says vampire-series author Richelle Mead. "Vampires play off that. I have heard people speculate that with the economic downturn . . . these books . . . serve a need for some larger escape."
Or as Tony Allen-Mills put it in the Sunday Times of London: "The zombie has become the mascot of the global economic recession and a world shaken by terrorism."
Some think the paranormal surge began shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. Danny Boyle's zombie film 28 Days Later appeared in 2002. Dawn of the Dead arose in 2004, and George Romero's epic Land of the Dead in 2005. World War Z, a zombie apocalypse novel by Max Brooks, has sold more than 200,000 copies since it appeared in 2006.
Zombies have been used to question, satirize, or warn of the demise of contemporary culture. It's hard to watch Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead without seeing the angst of the Vietnam era. Vampire films often touch on divisive issues, such as AIDS in 1994's Interview With the Vampire and racism in 1995's Vampire in Brooklyn.
Since the earliest vampire films, such as the 1922 Nosferatu or 1931's iconic Dracula with Bela Lugosi, they've been studies of those who are different, those on the outside with no way in. Vampires, says Alan Ball, producer of True Blood, can be "a metaphor for any kind of misunderstood and feared minority that is struggling for equal rights in a society, which of course makes it very easy to use metaphors for gays and lesbians, bisexual [and] transgender people."
Or maybe the occult flowers as eras end. Katherine Ramsland, vampirologist and author of The Science of Vampires and The Blood Hunters, says, "I've been watching this trend for over 20 years, and I've seen that as a significant time period draws to a close - a decade, a century, a millennium - there is a surge of Gothic or supernatural focus. Vampire novels were also huge in the late 1980s and 1990s, and Dracula was published in 1897."
It's almost - eerie. In 1929 (oh, dark year!), William Seabrook's The Magic Island spurred the pulpy fiction and films about zombies. In 1989, the splatter-punk anthology Book of the Dead began a decade of offshoots and imitators. To stretch the rule a bit, the mother of all zombie flicks, Night of the Living Dead, appeared in 1968. The TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired from 1997 to 2003, nicely bracketing the turn of the millennium. And 2009 has seen the success of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
"It may be partly due to a collective inarticulate sense of an era terminating," Ramsland says, poetically. "We defy the feeling of closure and death by dancing dangerously with it."
They don't call it "supernatural romance" for nothing. At the core of many vampire and zombie tales, there's a love story, either a human-human bond threatened by vamps, werefolk, demons, or zombies, or a forbidden love across the line between living and dead. (Think of Buffy Summers' bond with Spike.)
Mead, author of the young-adult Vampire Academy series (Blood Promise debuts this month), says, "The allure of the forbidden is what draws many people in, the romance between the immortal, sometimes dead, and always dangerous on one side, and the human on the other."
Maybe, as paranormal-romance novelist Marjorie M. Liu says, "it's the coming of age of people raised on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and The X-Files." Or, as Mead says, "it's the Harry Potter generation growing up and wanting a more sophisticated, edgier kind of world."
Romance is the pulsating heart of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, with the tortured love of Isabella Swan for the vampire Edward Cullen. Meyer patterns her books on classic romances: Twilight on Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse on Wuthering Heights, and 2008's Breaking Dawn on The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Last year was Twilight's year. Breaking Dawn, the fourth novel in the quartet, sold 1.3 million copies its first day out. The 2005 book Twilight ended last year as the No. 1 bestseller, and the four books were 1 through 4 on USA Today's year-end list. The film of Twilight, released last fall, grossed more than $382 million in worldwide box office and $157 million in DVD sales to date. Its sequel, New Moon, will be released in November.
True Blood is modeled on Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries. (The latest, Dead and Gone, debuted in May atop the New York Times hardcover list.) Season 1 followed the amour between telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse and vampire Bill Compton.
Liu, author of the Dirk & Steele and Hunter Kiss series, says supernatural romance "is about female empowerment. Shelters for abused women often distribute romance novels, and there's a reason for it. Heroines who kill demons and hunt vampires - they're tough chicks."
Bob Wietrak, director of merchandising at Barnes & Noble, calls the paranormal romance craze "phenomenal." Fully 16 percent of all romances Barnes & Noble sold last year were paranormal, and it's "even more this year."
Wietrak reports "an explosion of teen interest" as readers mature, stoked by TV and movie hits, which in turn are stoked by book sales. Fans read "fast, voraciously," he says. "One of our challenges is to keep finding new books and new authors to satisfy the market."
Bookstore, fan, author, and publisher Web sites link up in synergy, often producing explosive first-week sales: "There will be a huge surge when a title appears; we'll sell 20 to 25 percent of our eight-week sales the first few days," Wietrak says.
At first bite, zombies seem less romantic than the undying passion of vampires. But some of the most popular zombie films, such as the hilarious shock-mocker Shaun of the Dead, revolve around romance. And now we have the wacky success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
The guy who had the idea is Jason Rekulak, editorial director of Quirk Books, in Philadelphia. Attracted to YouTube "mash-up" culture, he decided to combine two genres, one classic and the other pop-culture. On a sheet of paper he made a column of "public-domain titles we couldn't get sued for mashing up, like Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Pride and Prejudice." In another column, he listed zombies, monsters, and figures from other horror genres. Then he drew lines between the columns.
"As soon as I drew the line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies," Rekulak says, "I knew we had a great title and a great idea." Grahame-Smith signed on as writer, and the rest has been crazy.
Unbeknownst to Rekulak, they were about to surf the wave. "We were worried at first that the Jane Austen readers wouldn't like the ultraviolent zombie mayhem, or that zombie readers wouldn't like the Jane Austen passages. Turns out they go together!
"We started with a literary joke we thought might work, and we ended up taking advantage of a boom right now in supernatural romance. After Twilight, we have the best-branded romance there is - everyone knows Pride and Prejudice!"
P&P&Z, out since only April, is in its 16th printing. A new mash-up titled Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Austen in "posthumous collaboration" with Ben H. Winters, is due in September.
Grahame-Smith, meantime, has signed a $575,000 contract with Time Warner to write - you guessed it - Abraham Lincoln: Zombie Hunter.
The Envelope, Awards Insider | LATimes.com
Wow! Members of the Television Critics Association actually put their awards where their big mouths are! Finally, the TCA Awards recognized "Battlestar Galactica" after voters beat the beans out of the Emmys for failing to give the show any major awards in the past.
Can this mean a break from the TCA Awards' hypocrisy? In years past, voters whined, fumed and harrumphed about the Emmys failing to recognize "The Wire" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," then they snubbed them too. TCA members never gave those shows real prizes — just handed them that bogus "Heritage Award" after they went off the air and failed to win best drama series or program of the year.
"Battlestar Galactica" didn't win a significant TCA Award in the past and now finally reaped one after sailing off the airwaves, but at least it's fared better than other great TV series cruelly snubbed by TCA and the television academy. And while TCA voters skunked vampires back in Buffy's heyday, they did just hail HBO's walking dead by giving "True Blood" their prize as best new program. TV academy members recently drove a stake through "True Blood's" Emmy hopes by snubbing it in all top categories, including best drama actress, which was a major surprise considering Anna Paquin is a past Oscar winner ("The Piano") and Emmy nominee ("Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee").
But don't get too excited about the TCA Awards mending its old, bad kudos biases in a big way. As usual, women just got snubbed in the performance categories. This year, those awards went to Jim Parsons ("The Big Bang Theory") and Bryan Cranston ("Breaking Bad") at the expense of Tina Fey ("30 Rock") and Glenn Close ("Damages"), the only women nominated this year. That's typical.
Sometimes TCA kindly permits a token female to get an honorary career achievement award. This year, that lucky (and deserving) gal was Betty White.
Below, a full list of winners:
PROGRAM OF THE YEAR
"Battlestar Galactica"
NEW PROGRAM
"True Blood"
DRAMA SERIES
"Mad Men"
COMEDY SERIES
"The Big Bang Theory"
NEWS & INFORMATION
"The Alzheimer's Project"
CHILDREN'S PROGRAM
"Yo Gabba Gabba"
MOVIES, MINISERIES, SPECIALS
"Grey Gardens"
COMEDY INDIVIDUAL
Jim Parsons
DRAMA INDIVIDUAL
Bryan Cranston
HERITAGE AWARD
"E.R."
CAREER ACHIEVEMENT
Betty White
SAN DIEGO | Let the record show that Hollywood’s vampire obsession reached its inevitable point of convergence at the Comic-Con International show last weekend.
During a panel with the cast of HBO’s “True Blood,” a young woman in the audience asked the show’s producer, Alan Ball, if “we could expect a half-human, half-vampire baby on the show.”
To his everlasting credit, Ball looked like he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then the audience called out, “Twilight! Twilight!”
Someone on the dais explained to Ball that it was a reference to the popular teenage novels and movie adaptation. Ball nodded and leaned into the microphone.
“No,” he declared. Loud cheers followed.
Well, you can’t blame a girl for asking.
After a mostly blood-soaked first season, “True Blood’s” second season has provided the sexual release viewers were expecting all along. This, in turn, has raised the stakes for everybody involved in the fangbangers-in-the-bayou drama ... and made the show a lot more interesting.
Indeed, judging from all the nuttiness going on in Season 2, a hybrid Dracu-baby is one of the few options Ball seems to have ruled out.
I was asked, after the Emmy nominations were announced last month, why “True Blood” hadn’t picked up any major nods. “Because it didn’t deserve any,” was my answer. (Only Season 1 episodes were eligible for this year’s Emmy consideration.) Last year the blood flowed like water, and the story line moved like molasses. This season, at least, the drama and the plasma are keeping pace with each other.
Next year, I think “True Blood” has a legitimate shot at Emmys, although I must say I wasn’t encouraged by the sizzle reel that was brought down to San Diego to wow the 4,500 cheering fans packed into the ballroom for the “True Blood” session.
Before we get to that, though, here’s that part in my column where I take a moment to explain to readers why they should invest time in a convoluted TV series like “True Blood.” (This problem didn’t exist back in the days of Quinn Martin Productions.)
At its core, “True Blood” is a love story between Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who’s old enough to remember the movie “The Piano,” and a vampire, Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), who is old enough to remember the first Steinway.
Sookie works at a roadside bar and grill, along with many of the show’s more colorful characters. Also, she is telepathic. (You’d think being able to hear the thoughts of everyone around her, she’d have picked another career besides waitress.) As you can imagine, that creates barriers of intimacy between herself and others. In fact, it took her a whole season and change to get it on with Bill.
Sadly for our heroine, Bill is caught up in a movement that’s larger than himself. That movement is both political and mystical. Political, in that vampires are demanding equal rights because the Japanese have developed a synthetic blood substitute that, in theory at least, allows blood-suckers to go legit.
Mystical, in that novelist Charlaine Harris has set her series of Stackhouse mysteries in the deep rural areas of Louisiana, where all manner of crazy stuff like shape-shifting and bodily possession takes place that they just don’t allow in those uptight, conservative big cities.
These literary decisions have helped the adaptation, “True Blood,” stand out in the suburbanized television landscape. For instance, the clever British series “Being Human,” now airing 8 p.m. Saturdays on BBC America, doesn’t seem as imaginative because with the sound down, it looks like just another program with three good-looking young city dwellers (who happen to be a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire).
There’s simply no room in these other series for some of “True Blood’s” more appealing characters. Take Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), a drug-dealing, gay-prostituting short-order cook who got some of the biggest cheers from the Comic-Con crowd. I think some of his appeal comes from the comeuppance he has suffered at the hands of the local vampire sheriff, Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard). And I know what you’re thinking: How bad can a program be that has Alexander Skarsgard playing a local vampire sheriff?
Michelle Forbes has a juicy role as Maryann, a shape-shifting matron who lives in a mansion and is responsible for one of the pairings (besides Sookie and Bill) that has been steaming up the windows of Season 2.
That would be between Sookie’s best friend, Tara (Rutina Wesley), and handsome stranger Eggs (Mehcad Brooks). The preview reel that we saw suggests two things about their relationship: one, that they will continue to get it on, and two, that their eyes will turn a spooky shade of death. I’m not sure if one leads to the other — that’s why it’s a preview reel.
Finally, amid all of the blood-shedding (mostly non-synthetic) and clothes-shedding (ditto, from what I can tell), there is a subplot involving a holy-roller church of sorts, the Fellowship of the Sun. And here is where “True Blood” has the potential to lose me just as it was starting to reel me back in.
When “Six Feet Under” was on HBO, I was glad that Ball had the foresight to include Christianity as a major force in a TV drama about death and being gay. Ultimately, though, I decided it was of little use to anyone working on that show other than as a dramatic foil.
Sookie’s brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten) has gotten involved with the Fellowship, which believes that “God hates fangs.” This is an obvious reference to our friends from Topeka, once again putting them on the national stage and treating them as a much bigger deal than they are here.
From what I can tell, in the rest of this season’s episodes the church is going to launch a major offensive against Vampire Nation, and unlike the sheriff, they ain’t taking prisoners. In the clips, as in the episodes I’ve watched, the Fellowship of the Sun looks angry, maniacal, cartoonish and unlike any house of God I’ve ever been in.
We are not affiliated with Charlaine Harris or her publisher.
