Oct 1, 2009

[TV] True Blood: Season 1

True Blood: Season 2I've never been a big fan of vampire stories. Sure, I'm never been against them either but it's just that I've never really felt the need to go out of my way to get involved with the whole mythos. If the show or movie is already there, then I'm not adverse to watching it and will still promise to finish it.

In recent years, vampires seem to have made a major comeback. Seriously, we haven't seen this much vampire love since the height of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles back in the day. I think we just move in cycles when it comes to our love of stories of the supernatural nature where vampires tend to alternate with popular support with zombies or something.

It's a weird theory, and I'm still working on it. You'll see how it'll make sense in the long run, believe me.

With vampires invading our TV screens again, I finally decided to give them a chance to see what the fuss was all about.

True Blood is a vampire TV series created by HBO and based on the The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of books by Charlaine Harris. The main premise of her vampire world is that scientists have finally come up with synthetic blood and thus vampire can now live amongst human society without the need to feed on other humans. Naturally this has been met with mixed reactions with Vampires now taking the role of the mistrusted minority.

In the Louisiana town of Bon Temps, a vampire named Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) arrives given the death of his last existing relative in the town. He meets Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who also happens to be a telepath and a waitress at a bar owned by Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), who also has a supernatural secret of his own. Thus you get the usual small town versus the outside dynamics plus a murder mystery of a different variety.

The mystery involves a series of serial killings involving various women where the only weak connection between all of them is the fact that they were suspected to have slept with vampires and that many of them were found dead after having been with Sookie's brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten).

LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 09:  (L-R) Actors Ryan ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Not to sound too racist, but I'm really not a fan of Southern accents. Maybe this stems more from my work in the call center industry where a lot of agents have difficulties understanding folks from the South. I don't think I'm that bad at it but naturally there's still that effort needed to interpret at times and the show tends to thrive in this environment given the Southern setting.

The characters are pretty rich in back story, which is expected from a series adapted from books, plus are pretty well fleshed-out on screen. Sure, I may not necessarily like many of the characters for who they are but then that's the point, isn't it - to make characters so real that you develop strong emotions about them?

I do love Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), who is simply fabulous as the gay cook / "drug" dealer. That man has enough attitude to take on the entire cast, vampires and all. Oh, and of course we all endure the incredibly slow, thick and red neck Jason Stackhouse since he has an extreme propensity for getting naked and being all incredibly hot. Whether or not I could actually deal with a person that slow in real life is beyond me but this is why we have television.

I eventually got more into the show towards the latter half of the season and I definitely see myself getting around to watching the second season once I've finished acquiring the last episode a little later today. I'm not going to make time for it and go out of my way and such but I will get around to it. Promise.

The first season of True Blood gets 3.5 bottles of Tru Blood (Type O) out of a possible 5.


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