Saturday, August 21, 2010

'True Blood' Saturdays': 'We will eat you after we eat your children'

The big "True Blood" story this week was the show ending up on the cover of Rolling Stone. Only it wasn't a particularly chaste cover. The series' three stars -- Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyers and Alexander Skarsgard -- appeared completely naked, with hands and legs covering the parts you can't show on a newsstand and blood drenching everything else. If you want to look at it, you can see it here. It's slightly not suitable for work, but, honestly, if your boss gets upset that you're looking at a Rolling Stone cover that's in the news, it may be time to find a new boss (and good luck with that).

Anyway, if you like your sex all mixed up with implied violence -- and this being "True Blood," there's a good chance you do -- then you probably love this cover. And, indeed, most of the fan reaction I've read online is really in favor of this. I guess I can see why. It essentially encompasses much of the show's cheekily sexy and bloody aesthetic, and it doesn't hurt that all three stars look good naked. But -- and maybe this is my former print media employee talking here -- I found it all kind of tawdry. The sex and violence on "True Blood" are so fun because they're so over the top. Everybody's getting naked, and everybody's getting drenched with blood. To try to encompass all of that in one image that flirts with the edge of good taste is probably an impossible task, but this one is winking a little too hard. There's basically no subtlety to it, and while I suppose that may be true of the show as well, much of the time, at least the show is rarely coy about anything. It's all right there, out in the open.

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