True Blood: TV with bite

From GQ Magazine

A steamy, delicious slice of Southern Gothic, with a side order of graphic sex and extreme violence, and some deep fried black comedy, HBO's bloody vampire saga True Blood begins its British run on FX on Friday night - before presumably, following the pattern of The Wire et al and switching to a more mainstream channel, by which time everyone who's even vaguely interested will have seen it on DVD or illegal download. (How long can this go on?)

However and whenever you're able to watch it, though, it's worth the effort: I've only seen the first two episodes, but already I'm hooked. True Blood is the latest offering from Alan Ball, Oscar winning screenwriter of American Beauty and the man behind Six Feet Under, HBO's long-running funeral home drama. In America, where it's already well into its second season, it has become the cable subscription channel's most popular show ever, outdoing even The Sopranos.

This doubtless has something to do with True Blood's direct appeal to a public entangled in one of its periodic obsessions with tales of the undead, from the extraordinary success of the Twilight franchise - books and movie - to the more nuanced charms of Let the Right One In, this year's surprise art-house hit from Sweden. As James Wolcott remarked in Vanity Fair, pop culture is sucking itself dry.

True Blood is strange, and dark, and adult, and there's a lot of subtext - the racism and homophobia metaphors are about as subtle as a bite to the neck - but it's also straight-ahead entertainment, without much of the complexity of HBO's previous hits. Not that there's any shame in that. As Ball himself put it, in an interview with the New York Times, "Women love the storytelling and the romance, and men love the sex and violence."

Set in the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, True Blood conjures a world in which vampires have recently come out of hiding to assert their rights as an oppressed minority. They've been able to do this because of the development, in Japan, of TruBlood, an effective synthetic human blood substitute that prevents them having to feed on mortals. It's available over the bar, or at the gas station.

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