I guess it is the time of the year, but we seem to be inundated with vampires and zombies on our screens, both big and small, and they seem to be coming all sorts of flavours. From the ultra low budget zombie flick COLIN, through the comedy of ZOMBIELAND, to the Korean art house vampire movie THIRST, we are surrounded by the undead. And they are coming into our homes as well. There is, however, one vampire series definitely worth inviting in and that is True Blood, from HBO.
Coming from HBO and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, you immediately know this isn’t going to be some fey, glittery vampire show. This is real grown up stuff, as they say “with violence and strong language from the start”. From the excellent opening credit sequence with the down-and-dirty theme tune (Bad Things by Jace Everett) it is clear this is a new take on vampires that takes away all the glamour.
Set in Bon Temps, a small community in Louisiana, during a time when the vampires have “come out of their coffins” and entered into a truce with the humans, thanks to the development of an synthetic substitute, the titular True Blood. The show follows the story of waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin, who won a best actress Emmy for her role), who can hear people’s thoughts, and the arrival of gentleman vampire Bill Compton (Brit actor Stephen Moyer), who returns to his ancestral home. Of course, they fall in love, because it seems you can’t have a vampire series or film without a vampire and a human falling in love. As people start dying in the town suspicion is immediately put on the vampires, who are suffering from the same prejudices inflicted on the blacks decades before, although they are hardly down-trodden, particularly as their blood serves as a powerful drug and aphrosdisiac, but they still incur the wrath of the religious right.
The show’s first season introduces some fantastic characters including Sookie’s sex-mad brother Jason, bar owner Sam, acid tongued Tara and her flamboyant cousin Lafayette, as well as humour and lots of graphic sex, gore and swearing. What more could you want from a TV series? It’s not a match for Battlestar Galactica, but it is a different sort of show that should probably compared with Angel. While Angel came from the brilliance of Joss Whedon, it did have a few flat spots, but so far True Blood has gone places Angel wouldn’t, or couldn’t, dare to go.
If you like well-written, grown-up television then you can’t go wrong with this. The trouble is, with only 12 epsiodes in the season, and each episode ending on a cliffhanger, you have to be prepared to sacrifice your weekend. There’s not a lot in the way of extras beyond commentaries, but the show is so good it doesn’t really matter. And season two is even more weird and wonderful.
True Blood is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 26 October from HBO and can be ordered from Play.