Has True Blood ruined the chances for more vampire TV?

HBO's sultry, silly, sanguine hit show routinely pushes everything to 11 — leaving little room for other bloodsucking fare to make a mark. Which is a shame, because there's one vamp project that should see the light of, er, day.

Alan Ball's televised take on Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels is many things — funny, sexy, punchy, twisty — but you'd be hard-pressed to find a show on television with as many bat-shit insane things happening week after week. And it's hard to compete with crazy.

Has True Blood ruined the chances for more vampire TV?Just ask ABC's desperate-vampires show The Gates, which premiered to about the same number of viewers as True Blood (which is a bad thing, given that ABC is a broadcast network, with a much larger potential audience than HBO's paying customers). Or The Vampire Diaries — the CW's highest rated show, but it still pulls down about the same numbers as True Blood — which seems to exist to help vampophiles cope in between Twilight movies and seasons of, yes, True Blood.

So which network — broadcast or otherwise — is going to hatch a new bloodsucker series given such an overwhelming argument not to? Exactly. And that's too bad, because Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt novels are perfectly suited for a long-form serial treatment.

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