My tastes usually run to the living.
When "True Blood" premiered on HBO last September, it struck me as too fantastical to appeal as serious drama, too awash in gushing blood to entice week to week. I was at best lukewarm to vampire stories other than those involving Buffy slayage.
But "True Blood's" humor won me over, its excessive blood lust a minor point en route to its knowing social commentary.
There are easier, less-violent shows on cable this summer. But easier isn't the answer.
Now that it's got the summer to itself, "True Blood" is looking better and better, and gaining traction with viewers. Apparently more viewers are giving it another shot in the months when there are fewer quality dramatic distractions.
And the series, with new episodes Sundays at 7 p.m. on HBO, is as funny and as unapologetically bloody as ever.
The hour delivers satisfying comedy and witty social satire — along with the requisite grit, gore, fantasy and, not least, the boundary-pushing sexuality promised by the premium channel.
Beyond the fangs, which click into place over the actors' teeth with the goofy thrill of a cheap effect when a vamp is overcome by blood thirst, this is thoughtful small-screen filmmaking. Now and then the silliness of the fangs gimmick jolts your awareness that this is a real genre piece. Creator Alan Ball calls it "popcorn TV for smart people."
The story lines of "True Blood" are rife with allusions to teenage mood swings and impulse control, adult hedonism, religious compulsion, cross- cultural romance and intermarriage — of the inter-species kind.
On the surface, the action may specifically concern shape-shifters who turn from human to canine form, and undead bloodsuckers who avoid daylight and can move at supersonic speed. But going deeper, it is more generally a study of subcultures, discrimination and timeless romance.
Ball ("Six Feet Under") has beautifully adapted the well-received Southern Gothic novels by Charlaine Harris following the adventures of clairvoyant Sookie Stackhouse in Bon Temps, La. Ball makes the most of the vampire/Southern Gothic form, sometimes forgoing any subtlety. When he closes an episode with a musical rendition of "What can wash away my sins? Nothin' but the blood of Jesus," the moody, hilarious and pointed commentary gets the perfect end note.
Anna Paquin ("The Piano") is fetching as the short-shorts- wearing roadhouse barmaid, Sookie. Stephen Moyer ("The Starter Wife") is oddly magnetic in layers of gray makeup as the 173-year-old vamp, Bill Compton. He steals Sookie's heart, but not literally — that's another story line.
In this parable, vampires have won the right to marry humans in Vermont. And lots of folks in Ku Klux Klan territory are tsk-ing about that. But the underclass of vamps, coming out of the casket, still faces tremendous prejudice and instances of self-loathing.
Religious extremists preach vamp-ophobia and shun the "vamp-bangers" who consort with the undead. Sookie's brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten) is entranced by the cultists who want him reborn as one of their own.
"Vampires!" laments an evangelical hater. "Everything they are, down to their very blood, is seductive."
Sookie's best friend Tara (Rutina Wesley) has come under the spell of the mysterious love goddess Maryann (Michelle Forbes), living in her luxurious estate where the food, like the romance, is too good to be true.
And while vampires pass on the tradition of becoming a "Maker" to a newly born vamp, they can't escape the travails of parenthood, dealing with adolescent angst. In this case, Sookie unwittingly becomes something of a stepmom to the vamp Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), whom Bill has turned from human to one of the fanged. The young'un suffers the usual teen embarrassment about her caretakers, pouting, "I'd die if I wasn't already dead."
Typical Ball goofiness amid the somber dramatic turns.
The question, for the undead and the living alike, is simple. What level of humanity resides in each person?
It's all so very seductive.
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