Tuesday, June 23, 2009

True Blood's Second Season Finds New Veins to Tap

From Vanity Fair

Perhaps it was the lackluster summer of television, or maybe it was the ubiquitous True Blood posters asking me if I was “ready for seconds?” Whatever the motive, last week I set out to discover which of the two I was: fang-banger or fang-hater.

I wasn’t the only one: the second season premiere of HBO’s True Blood drew in 5.1 million viewers, twice as many as the season-one finale last fall.

The first season followed a whodunit murder plotline, pulled directly from Charlaine Harris’s first “Southern Vampire Mysteries” book, Dead and Gone, and spiced with vampire lore, pertinent political undertones, and the lugubrious setting of backwoods Louisiana. The writers balanced the soap-operatic story lines and near-campy amounts of blood and sex with real social criticism, the fight for vampire rights reflecting the current debate about gay rights and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. (Bigoted evangelicalism finds a counterpart in the Fellowship of the Sun, a church that warns against the evils of vampires and their sympathizers.)

Read on

0 comments: