Handsome Stranger? Be Careful. He Bites.

NYTimes from September 2008
By Alessandra Stanley

One of the older waitresses at Merlotte's, a dive bar in Bon Temps, La., doesn't dare refuse to serve her customer Trublood, but draws the line at true hospitality. The stranger orders O negative, but is told there is only A negative, even though the fridge is full of both synthetic blood types.
''And don't microwave it, neither,'' the waitress says to the bartender.
''He can drink it cold.''

The vampires on ''True Blood,'' a new series on HBO, have ''come out of the coffin,'' as one woman puts it, thanks to a Japanese substitute that supposedly satisfies their inhuman blood lust. They are seeking acceptance and passage of the Vampire Rights Amendment in a society that is still prejudiced against the life-threatening lifestyles of the living dead.

Vampires have Washington lobbyists, support groups and talk show pundits.
They also have their own louche bars, and the one closest to Bon Temps is Fangtasia, where reckless mortals, known as Fang-bangers, trawl for the intoxicating taste of vampire sex.

That sly sendup of American culture and pop politics is one of the more amusing features in this new venture by Alan Ball, the creator of ''Six Feet Under.'' It's not the only inversion.

Mr. Ball, who also wrote the film ''American Beauty,'' is known for imbuing the most humble and prosaic settings -- a Southern California funeral parlor, a middle-class suburb -- with complex psychological themes and stylish lyricism. He does the opposite with ''True Blood,'' leavening fantasy romance and perverse Southern Gothic with the petty preoccupations of small-town life: ''Dark Shadows'' with a splash of Mayberry.

Vampires have an eternal place in American entertainment. Every generation has its bloodsuckers, from Bela Lugosi and Anne Rice's Lestat to ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'' Love with a supernatural stranger, a soul mate with a dangerous edge, is a particularly resilient romantic fantasy. But the familiarity of the cliches -- garlic, silver crosses, Transylvania -- also abets playfulness. And there is fun to be found in bending the paranormal to fit into the most earthly, banal settings.

Festooned with Spanish moss and swampy Southern nostalgia, this twist on the vampire conceit is full of allusions to racism and homophobia, but the metaphors are hazily applied and don't go very deep. The tale gets more engrossing as it goes along, but the first five episodes, at least, don't quite live up to the fierce score and the amazing, hallucinatory opening montage.

''True Blood'' is based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries, a series of fantasy novels by Charlaine Harris that revolve around Sookie Stackhouse, a cocktail waitress who solves murders while playing hard to bite with a tall, handsome vampire. Mr. Ball has taken what is basically a quirky romance novel and turned it into an R-rated melodrama puffed up with erotic tension and campy gore. It's creepy, steamy and funny at times, and it's also a muddle, a comic murder mystery that is a little too enthralled with its own exoticism. ''True Blood'' is outre, but it's not nearly as eccentric and inventive as ''Six Feet Under'' or even ''Big Love.''

Sookie, played with a clipped Holly Hunter twang by Anna Paquin, is perky, blond and psychic -- she can read people's thoughts. Sookie calls her gift a ''disability,'' one that has left her something of a recluse as well as a virgin. She lives with a dotty, doting grandmother, Adele (Lois Smith), and hangs out with her best friend, a feisty black woman named Tara (Rutina Wesley) who can't hold her tongue, or a job, and is also something of a loner.

One of the more interesting and less stereotypical characters is Tara's cousin Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), a short-order cook at Merlotte's by day, a gay hooker and drug dealer by night.

When a tall, pale and handsome stranger named Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) enters Merlotte's, Sookie knows at once that he is a vampire, the first to make himself known in tiny Bon Temps. She is tickled, not fearful -- nothing exciting ever happens in her small, redneck community, and she yearns for romance. Sookie finds him irresistibly seductive, partly because he is the first man she has ever met whose mind she cannot read.

Sex is on everyone else's minds, and it takes all of Sookie's concentration not to hear her friends and neighbors' crudest fantasies and lascivious musings. Vampires are predators, but they are also prey: it turns out that in small quantities, vampire blood has an aphrodisiac effect on humans, and there is a brisk illegal trade in V, vampire blood.

Sookie's strapping, dimwitted brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), is the town's Casanova, but unfortunately for him, some of the women he sleeps with turn up dead. He's an obvious suspect, but plenty of people in town prefer to blame the vampires for the crimes. Sookie's boss, Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammel), believes in segregation for the undead.

When Sookie chides him for seeking a return to the days of ''separate but equal,'' Sam says he doesn't care about equality. ''Give them more than we got,'' he says, ''just as long as everything is separate.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/arts/television/05bloo.html