True Blood: Just what TV genres need – new blood

From Financial Times ( yes, seriously )

The must-see series is True Blood (Channel 4 Wednesday), produced by Alan Ball (the man behind Six Feet Under) for HBO and adapted from Charlaine Harris’s vampire stories. It continues the HBO tradition of a genre that mixes genres: it’s part-vampire movie, part-sitcom based round waitresses in a Louisiana bar, part-mystery, part-soft(ish) porn, and overall a brilliant comic creation.

Anna PaquinIn this world, vampires have just become a recognised minority following the passing of the Vampire Rights Amendment and the provision of synthetic blood supplies so that they need no longer prey on humans. Liberals, such as waitress-heroine Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin, pictured), approve: confronted with evidence that vampires have not abandoned their bloodsucking ways, she says “I happen to think that to judge people on the actions of a few is wrong!”

She falls in love with a handsome vampire and offers him her (rare) virginity; he, falling for her, restrains his desire to sink his fangs into her and keeps his literally bloodthirsty colleagues, who come to his ruined plantation for blood and sex romps, away from her. Around them, young men and women couple, scratch a living and bemoan the boredom of small-town society. Sookie’s best friend, Tara, who is black, mocks whites for their supposed racism or their obvious stupidity, playing with affirmative action pieties for her own advantage and amusement.

It’s a monstrously fine and funny piece of work, because it so cleverly comments on contemporary anxieties, fads and follies while telling a story at the same time. And it is witty too: a tabloid headline on a counter proclaims “Angelina to adopt a vampire baby”. Contemporary American society has been imagined anew, with all its crazinesses and its grandeurs. It’s how comedy should be.

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