True Blood
(Season 1)
a DVD review by Heather Craig
There’s a new vampire on the (small) screen joining the ranks of Angel/Angelus, Spike/William the Bloody, Lestat, Edward Cullen, and of course Dracula, and his name is Bill Compton. That’s right : a vampire named Bill. Our heroine found his moniker hilarious, saying, “I thought it might be Antoine or Basil.” But then her own name is Sookie Stackhouse.
Sookie is living in Bon Temps, Louisiana, working as a waitress, dealing with her own problem, which is that she has been able to read minds since she was a child. She doesn’t particularly like knowing what people are thinking 24/7 and does her best to block them all out, but there is a constant din inside her head. It is no surprise then when she falls for vampire Bill. She can’t read his thoughts and she considers this very restful. She can relax. Bill too is interested in Sookie. Ever since vampires came out of the coffin, they have been trying to convince humans of their desire to peacefully co-exist, and Bill truly wants to mainstream. Sookie impresses him by saving him from a couple out to drain his blood (vampire blood is sold as a drug and can be highly addictive), and their relationship progresses from there. Meanwhile, there are a series of murders of women in Bon Temps. Is a vampire the culprit, or could it be a serial-killing human?
Thus is the premise of True Blood, an HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris. The first season is mostly based on the first book Dead Until Dawn, the only one of the nine novels that I have actually read. As in most books adapted to series (see Dexter), the main plot is the same but side characters are far more fleshed out.
And True Blood has a lot of side characters. There’s Sookie’s himbo brother, Jason, who can’t seem to concentrate any further than his next conquest but is surprisingly likable all the same; Sookie’s best friend Tara (who doesn’t even appear in the first book), who is all pain and prickles ; Sookie’s mysterious boss, Sam, who has an obvious crush on her but whose past is shrouded in secrecy; Lafayette, the proudly gay cook at Merlotte’s where Sookie waitresses ; and too many more to even mention. Of the recurring characters, my favorite is Terry, the Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD who gives compliments like, “Your hair is like a sunset after a bomb went off… Pretty.”
The True Blood of the title is a synthetic blood substance developed for medical purposes in Japan but found to be something vampires could subsist on without ingesting human blood. It was after this discovery that vampires “came out” to humans. Coming out is far from the only metaphor for homosexuality in True Blood. It is legal to marry vampires in Vermont, I’ll have you know. There are countless parallels between the treatment of vampires in the True Blood world and that of gays in our own society, especially by some fundamentalists. The metaphor is not perfect, even though every anti-vampire person is portrayed as a frothing bigot. A major plot point in the series is that a number of vampires do not care for synthetic blood and still prefer the real thing. Not to mention the fact that there are a number of suspicious deaths surrounding those who are vocally anti-vampire. Even our noble hero Bill commits a murder he considers justified. In such circumstances, I can understand the wariness of some characters.
As it airs on HBO, there is a great deal of profanity and partial nudity. In fact, at times there are so many scenes of who is knocking boots that it becomes pretty tedious. True Blood is helmed by Alan Ball, the Oscar winning writer of American Beauty who has won several Emmys for helming the now ended Six Feet Under, and he makes the South a whole other character. You can almost feel the humidity while watching, and the atmosphere is well done. Filming is in both Los Angeles and in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the location shooting helps ground this supernatural series in some sense of reality.
The tone of the series, that mixture of the macabre and the rather ridiculous is seen in an early moment when Sookie’s adorable grandmother (the luminous Lois Smith of Five Easy Pieces) convinces Civil War veteran Bill to give a speech for her group The Descendants of the Glorious Dead. I grew up in a town with a chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution, so I could relate.
Anna Paquin, who was only ten years old when she won an Oscar for The Piano, is most famous for playing Rogue in the X-Men trilogy. She has won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Sookie, and she deserves it, finding the balance between making Sookie a genuinely kind person and still nobody’s fool. Stephen Moyer, who plays Bill, was a complete unknown to me, but as soon as I saw him sitting in Merlotte’s, I could picture him as the Bill from the book. The series rests on these two, and they ably carry it, with chemistry to spare, not hampered by the fact that they are a real-life couple.
Also of note are Sam Trammell (Sam) who manages to make you almost wish Sookie would return Sam’s feelings, and Nelsan Ellis, who somehow makes the flamboyant Lafayette macho. Ellis is a find. He fills up the screen with such a presence that it is difficult to watch the other actors.
And I have to say something about the bizarre opening credits, a montage of all things stereotypically southern, from swamp scenes and striking snakes to faith healings, all to the strains of Jace Everett singing “I Wanna Do Bad Things with You.” Between the song and the images, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting by the time the show starts.
Not all is perfect here. Plot points are wrapped up a bit suddenly, characters get out of character, and most annoyingly, for a couple of characters (Tara, I’m talking to you) Southern accents come and go and come again. This is no Dexter nor Burn Notice, but it is completely entertaining.
DVD extras include several commentaries. My favorite includes Stephen Moyer, mostly because I found his real voice, which is VERY British, so interesting after getting used to Bill’s lilting Southern drawl. There are also a couple of amusing PSAs for the Vampire Rights Amendment (pro and con) and a couple commercials for the drink True Blood.
