Deborah Hill Cone fails to get a taste for the returning True Blood.
The thing I like best about True Blood is the opening titles. They juxtapose shots of religious fervour, sexual abandon and small animals killing each other to a great song called Bad Things by Jace Everett. It is dead sexy. The rest of this hit HBO vampire series I can do without.
Sorry, I know I ought to like it. It's so terribly coolly depraved. I know that high culture and low culture - the classy and the trashy - are indistinguishable these days so I am just being a square and a snob finding it a bit grubby and tasteless. But True Blood, even redeemed with touches of ironic humour, just seems plain B-grade bad to me. And I know it is supposed to be a parable about gay rights (vampires are "coming out of the coffin" rather than the closet) but even pretensions to profundity don't make up for the fact most of it is just plain stupid.
True Blood returns for its third season on Prime this Wednesday. If you are the kind of person who likes vampire gore and you liked the first two then I am sure you will love this as well. It was well received overseas where it has just begun and already been renewed for a fourth season. "Fabulously wild," stated USA Today. "Faster, sleeker, more vicious, more fun that it already was," claimed Entertainment Weekly. But if, like me, you haven't watched the first two and are tuning in to the third to see what the fuss is about, don't expect it to be love at first bite. The script has too much profanity, not enough wit and is very hard to follow.
The lead character, Sookie (Anna Paquin doing a Meryl-worthy Southern accent) seemed to spend most of the first episode running around shrieking having lost her boyfriend, vampire Bill (Stephen Moyers), at the end of the second series after he proposed.
The dialogue didn't help much, either.
Pam: "Eric, you're losing it."
Eric: "How is that helpful Pam?"
Pam: "You need to call the queen."
Eric: "The queen is the last one I need finding out about this."
Pam: "You're not the only one whose fate hangs in the balance here."
Eric: "And what do you think the queen will do when she finds out I have lost the one vampire who can link her to the dealing of vampire blood?"
It sounds like it was written by a bunch of angsty fourth formers who had just seen Angel Heart and got off on the Southern voodoo gothic vibe.
Many people I know who have exemplary taste in television swear True Blood is brilliant. I know the series' creator, the maudlin Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), was passionate about the Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books by Charlaine Harris which the show is based on. But for all the gratuitous swearing and sucking and saucy hints of S&M, Anna Paquin's dishevelled hotness, and the not-too-shabby Alexander Skarsgard (Generation Kill), True Blood seems remarkably cold, dumb and, well, bloodless.
*True Blood returns to Prime, Wednesday at 9.30pm.
