HBO's True Blood: Bloody Fun

From Jul 11, 2008 02:58 PM by Matt Roush

Vamp fans- and you know who you are (I hear from you often enough)- I know you've had a tough year, still mourning Moonlight and Blood Ties and all. Time to cheer up, and get ready for a wild ride this fall with HBO's frightfully funky Southern Gothic ghoulash True Blood (premiering Sept. 7). With equal parts humor, horror and a sexuality that goes beyond the usual supernatural swooniness to graphic raunchiness, Alan Ball's 12-episode adaptation of Charlaine Harris's cheeky novels- the first season roughly follows her first book, "Dead Until Dark"- is one of the few buzzworthy shows to emerge in the new season.

Still, you'd never accuse Ball of (pardon the pun) sucking up to the die-hard cultists. Asked if he'd taken any lessons from the cancellation of CBS's Moonlight, for example, he quips: "I think it's pretty lame when you let your vampire out in the day just because you don't want to shoot at night." Ball, who happened across Harris's novels by accident, says he's never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel or read Anne Rice. "This is really my first foray into the world of vampires. All I knew was the movies that I'd seen." (He considers Near Dark "the best vampire movie ever made.")

Ball, whose previous HBO hit Six Feet Under had its own decidedly morbid streak, told critics during a TCA panel on Thursday: "After five years of peering into the abyss and contemplating life in the presence of mortality, I felt like let's do something else." True Blood is something else, all right. It's an unapologetically brazen hoot, all about a waitress named Sookie (Anna Paquin) who works in a Louisiana dive bar where she reads minds- more a curse than a gift- and who falls hard for the soulful and drop-dead-gorgeous vampire named Bill (Stephen Moyer) who walks into the bar one night. His mind is closed to her, which she finds delightfully and mysteriously appealing. And he's drawn to her for reasons he can't explain. ("What are you?" he continually wonders.)

The mythology is provocative: A synthetic blood product has allowed vamps to emerge into the open, no longer requiring humans for fuel. But the stigma follows them everywhere, and as debates rage on cable news about a pending Vampire Rights Amendment- decried, naturally, by the religious right- it's hard not to see in the vampires' otherness a metaphor for the current gay-rights struggle.

"All of that is in the books," Ball says, while cautioning: "I really don't look at the vampires as a metaphor for gays in a very specific way. For me, part of the joy of this whole series is that it's about vampires, and so we don't have to be that serious about it. However, they totally work as a metaphor for gays, for people of color in previous times in America, for anybody who is misunderstood and feared and hated for being different. I think because of the cultural climate that we exist in today, it seems like, oh well, they are a metaphor for gays because of gay marriage and gay rights and that kind of thing. But I think it's a bigger metaphor and at the same time it's also not a metaphor at all. It's vampires."

One of the more refreshing aspects of True Blood is that it doesn't really seem to be aiming for deeper meaning or moody self-importance. It's a juicy story, purely impure and often outrageous entertainment, surrounding Sookie and Bill with a colorful collection of Southern-fried characters, including Sookie's oversexed redneck brother and vampire-friendly granny (the wonderfully eccentric Lois Smith) and a hilariously tough, trash-talking best friend.

HBO has only made two episodes available for screening so far, so it's hard to tell just how divergent this new breed of vampires will be from the classic model. Ball teases: "In our world, a lot of the myths about vampires were created by vampires themselves over history so that they could pass. Because if you could convince everybody that you couldn't be seen in a mirror or that you would freak out if somebody shoved a crucifix in your face, then you could prove you weren't a vampire pretty easily."

Ball also talks of designing "a certain kind of physiology for the fangs" so they retract and click forward like rattlesnack fangs. "I wanted to approach the supernatural not as being something that exists outside of nature, but something that is more deeply rooted in nature." He also wanted to avoid "the instantaneous incineration or the instantaneous turning into dust" when a vampire is staked. (We haven't yet seen exactly what happens when stakes enter the picture, although there is a vivid demonstration of vampire poachers draining a vamp's blood for profit.)

"I didn't really want to focus too much on visual effects or special effects," says Ball. "I wanted it to be a show about characters and to really explore what it means to be 170 years old and what it means to fall in love with somebody who basically part of the relationship would involve, in a world that's mutually satisfying, being fed upon. Not being able to see this person except at night. Having the entire town think, what, are you crazy? That kind of thing."

OK, now that we've fed the cult fires, let's tackle the important question: Does HBO know what it's gotten into, giving the ravenous legion of vampire-TV fans a new crusade should True Blood not be an instant hit?

This was posed to HBO's newly installed entertainment president Sue Naegle, who good-naturedly described herself as "a bit of a nerd myself," someone who understands the passion people have for TV. Like "when they send tons of peanuts for Jericho."

"I wouldn't want them on my doorstep, but I can appreciate that passion," Naegle says. "I hope that this show gets that kind of rise out of people, as long as they don't send a bunch of coffins to my office. But I think that people care deeply about characters and their television shows, and when they have a community- in our modern world of blogs and online communities, people come together. There's bound to be a passionate voice. So bring it on."

Anna Paquin agrees: "How is having people who are really excited about your show a bad thing? I mean, come on. That's what you hope that a show is going to have, and if they are already there, waiting to be really excited, then awesome."

http://www.tvguide.com/roush/HBOs-True-Blood-9845.aspx