guest blog: true blood

True Blood is a new series that just premiered on HBO (Sundays at 9pm). Guest blogger, Egan Caufield, says this:

True Blood Sucks. The show takes place in a fictional small town in modern day Louisiana. In the show, thanks to the creation of synthetic blood, Vampires have come "out of the coffin" (seriously) and are able to live among humans without thirsting for blood. However, humans remain scared of the vampires and treat them as second-class citizens (see where this is going?), and taboo sexual objects. Anna Paquin, who was herself the subject of a sci-fi discrimination scheme in X-Men, plays Sookie Stackhouse (seriously), an innocent but progressive waitress who saves the life of a vampire and then, perhaps, falls for him. I should mention here that contrary to the prevailing mythos, vampires don't have permanent fangs, but can voluntarily retract them into normal-looking teeth. However, Anna Paquin does not exercise this option. In another inexplicable plot device, Sookie is able to hear the voices inside everyone's heads except for the vampire, whose name is...Bill (seriously). Unfortunately the internal monologue is done by the same writers as the rest of the show.

The show is heavy on innuendo, light on plot. In Episode 1, Sookie's brother Jason has kinky sex with a vampire fetishist--a "Fangbanger" (seriously)--who then dies, and he is taken to the police station for questioning. And...that was it. One hour, and that was the plot of the show, padded by about 40 minutes of not-so-eerie ambient vampire footage and awkward dialogue. Is the vampire who shows up in town involved? Was the fangbanger really a vampire herself? I don't actually care. I'm done with True Blood. Somewhat surprising that HBO was behind this. I mean, social commentary couched in a post-Katrina deep south vampire story? This should have been a slam dunk, right?