So here’s me, hitching a ride with the hype-train that is the vampire/twilight phenomenon. After having successfully had my fingers firmly planted in my ears since True Blood starting airing last summer, I finally relented to its alluring HBO goodness, even though I did get a bit sore from getting on down from my high horse (thanks for asking).

It’s not that I have much against vampires or even Twilight for that matter (I have never read or seen any of it), but well… if teenage girls are falling over themselves about just how cuuute a vampire is, I tend to get a bit miffed and start complaining about how vampires shouldn’t be cute. They should be scary. They should be mysterious. They should like to suck people dry, and if you’re so conflicted about having fangs, then there’s no one stopping you from taking a sunday morning stroll with some delightful charring on the side, is there? I know that I if had to spend eternity brooding over eating people… well, I guess what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t do that.

But apparently that’s what vampires do nowadays, so what do I know? And there’s no denying that there’s always been more of a romantic theme in the vampire mythos than in the, say, zombie or werewolf mythos. Hell, even Dracula had his ways with the damsels, but he always did end up eating them (like a proper vampire should).

As you’ve hopefully surmised by now, True Blood is a vampire show, or more precisely, the vampire show these days. It’s HBO’s biggest hit since the Sopranos, which was in its day the channel’s biggest hit ever, and since I’m a veritable sucker for HBO, I kind of had to check it out closer.

So I did. And you know what?

It’s not bad.

Not bad at all.

All though some of it is quite bad, but we’ll get to that later. First though, let’s discuss what it’s actually about.

We’ve already established that this is a vampire show, so as expected that’s where the main thrust of the show lies. A vampire named Bill walks into a small-town bar down in red-neck Louisiana, where our main character, Sookie Stackhouse, works for a living. He orders a bottle of True Blood, a synthetic blood-drink that vampires may drink if they’re not so keen on pulsing arteries, and makes big puppy-dog eyes over blonde little Sookie. You see,  Sookie is a special girl; she can hear what people think, and she hears it all the time. But she can’t hear what Bill thinks, plus, you know, he’s really cuuute… so you can pretty much spot that horse winning the race from the get-go.

So, fast forward and yada, yada, yaaa, we come up with a show that’s a little to the side of what you’d expect of an HBO production. When I think HBO, I think Rome, Deadwood & the Sopranos. I think gritty, realistic, well-written and meaty television. I think blood, sweat, tears and sex.

In True Blood’s case, only two of those characteristics apply: namely the sex & blood. There are some tears as well, but you see, when cute vampires cry, they cry tears of (oh-so-sad) blooood. So really, it doesn’t count, does it? But anyhoo, just to get a long-winded point out of the way: This isn’t a heavy HBO production. It’s more in the vein of shows like Entourage or, I imagine, Sex in the City, and there’s nothing really wrong with that, seeing as love my Entourage.

But the concepts of Entourage & True Blood are very different. On the one hand, you’ve got a show set in Hollywood about an industry that gets more press than anything else in the world, and on the other hand, you’ve got a show set in the world where vampires have just stepped out into the public’s eye. There’s a whole lot of secrets in True Blood, and while its themes are fluffy in parts, it’s a show with potential for some really fucked up shit (not that vampires aren’t fucked up enough as it is). But does it utilize that range?

The short answer? No, it sure as hell doesn’t.

The long answer? Well, it’s only the first season. And there fact that I can see vast reserves of potential in the show can only be a good omen for the future. True Blood’s main problem is surprisingly enough (for an HBO show, I mean) that it isn’t very well written. Or perhaps I should say it’s written in a very populistic manner, but that smacks of a poor euphemism, and I can’t have that.

But what’s wrong, then?

Well, it’s a lazy show. It’s got an over-arching plot line that’s highly under-explored and under-developed, and all too predictable and utilized in all too similar ways over the course of the season. It has a main character who can hear people’s thoughs, which is nifty device, but also one that requires the viewer to just go with the story-teller’s whim. Do we get to hear a clue, or are we left hanging? I would call this a big failing if they actually didn’t pull it off so well (I very rarely got annoyed by it), but it’s a failing none the less.

The show also suffers from some rather stiff characterization of its main players, which was very surprising to me. In most cases they didn’t even come close to building characters, and ended up setting up stereotypes in stead, or even just parodies. Now, I realize this is quite common with popular drama shows (it adds a certain humour thats easily relatable), but it really was quite disappointing that they ended up with such a lopsided gallery.

One thing I really enjoyed, however, was the way they treated the vampire aspect, which admittedly is a big part of the show. I couldn’t care less for the Bill (for reference, he’s the cute puppy-dog eyed one), but the rest of the vampires were easily more bad-ass, and it’s clear that there’s a wealth of potential to mine there. They even have a really old Swede as the district’s vampire sheriff, which I thought was really awesome (and when he talks Swedish, it actually sounds like Swedish, too, not like the “Norwegian” we heard in Twin Peaks).

Now, as for the fluff, I can’t say it’s really bothersome. Sure, I could live without Sookie’s heartbreak drama, but compared to the fluff of Buffy or Angel, this show doesn’t really have any to speak of. The best thing about the show for me was the feeling it managed to convey that the world they lived in was scary as shit and all too dangerous to be any kind of fun… but at the same time, it’s also a world where vampires & shapeshifters roam, and man, wouldn’t that be kind of cool?

Just a little bit?

I think so. And True Blood manages to do that really well, and I think that, given time, a lot of my problems with it should vanish like…

… a vampire in the sun.

Heh. I crack myself up.

7.5/10