Monday, September 13, 2010

'True Blood' recap: Keep your eyes on the road -LA Times

No matter what happens, a "True Blood" finale should make the viewer feel something. We should be weeping that it's all over and cursing that we have to wait until next summer. We should be intensely angry and disappointed, saying, "THAT was the finale?" We should be ecstatic from how excited we are at what just happened. We should feel one of the above or some combination of them. But the "True Blood" finale pretty much made me feel nothing. It felt, for all the world, like a tiny pause in the storyline before we barrel forward toward something else, as though the show would be back in a few weeks' time, and we'd head toward the real end of the story at this point. A season finale is a period or an exclamation mark. This was a comma.

Over the course of the third season, it's become clear that what I like about the show and what you guys like (and what the producers like) sit on opposite ends of some canyon that's impossible to cross. I think the show works best when it's streamlined, moving forward constantly like a shark. Many of you love the diversions and side-trips we take into storylines that don't have much to do with the main plot (beyond featuring characters that all live in the same small town in Louisiana). I like the show best when the characters are all working toward some sort of impossible plan. Many of you like getting lost in the flavor and color of the world. And that's fine. We don't all have to like TV shows for the same reasons. The best I can do here is explain why I've liked enough of this third season to be entertained but also explain why it's failed on levels that made me feel vaguely dissatisfied.

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