New Abnormalities from New York magazine

Flesh eaters from J.J. Abrams and bloodsuckers from Alan Ball. Oh my.

By John Leonard

....................Although generally witty, always absorbing, and invariably violent, True Blood isn’t really a big surprise until its fifth hour, when Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) addresses a congregation of Confederate nostalgics, wannabes, and ancillaries in a rustic Baptist church in southern-gothic Bon Temps, Louisiana. Tall, pasty, Edgar Allan Poetic, and 173 years old, Compton actually served as a Confederate Army first lieutenant during the Civil War. He can tell these poor people what they need to hear about their own vanquished ancestors, “the glorious dead.” Who cares, for a while anyway, that he’s a vampire? So accustomed have we become to bloodsucking as a metaphor for denial and desire—for carnal knowledge, forbidden fruit, alien abduction, drug addiction, lynching bees, and witch hunts—that we’ve forgotten about time. But of course: Past and present feed on each other’s wounds. History itself is ghostwritten and body-snatched.

This church meeting is a rare moment of genuine reflection in a welter that otherwise relies on the sly, the slick, and the absurd, on sex and the supernatural. From Charlaine Harris’s novels about Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress who falls in love with the first vampire to come into her bayou roadhouse after the Japanese invent synthetic blood, Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) has prestidigitated a cable series that combines true romance (Anna Paquin’s virginal Sookie is attracted to Compton because he’s the only man she’s ever met whose thoughts she can’t read), social satire (having “come out of the coffin,” vamps are encouraged to “mainstream,” though many would rather hang out in dives like Shreveport’s Fangtasia), serial murder (somebody’s determined to strangle the entire female population of Bon Temps), and chicken-fried stereotype (every cliché of redneck grotesque is lovingly included, from thuggish sheriff, pool-table slack jaw, and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt to speaking in tongues, cans of Fresca, and the Ku Klux Klan). Alien Nation, the old Fox series about two-hearted beaver-eating refugees from outer space trying to assimilate to Los Angeles, meets Beauty and the Beast, with a soupçon of Buffy’s trademark nonchalance. It certainly beats John From Cincinnati.

And so, to Lilith, Grendel, and Caliban, to Moloch and Minotaur, to devil worship, demonic possession, cannibalism, succubi and zombies, add the “fangbangers” of Bon Temps—Paquin’s lovelorn Sookie, as incorrigibly spunky as a Holly Hunter; Moyer’s Compton, so sensitive he might as well be dead; and Lois Smith’s grandmother Adele, a marvel of friendly feeling, cloudy thinking, and sound advice for which she’ll be brutally punished. Not to neglect Sookie’s smart-mouth black best friend and co-worker, Tara (Rutina Wesley), who reads Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, insults her customers, and takes slavery personally, and the gay black short-order cook at the roadhouse, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), who vends drugs and his own body. Tara and Lafayette are the equivalent, in True Blood, of clowns in Shakespeare and ghos
Read entire article here :http://nymag.com/arts/tv/reviews/50205/

You can watch the Glorious dead meeting here :


Part II