True Blood News

The Fairfield County Weekly recently ran a review on Charlaine Harris’ new HBO show True Blood. There’s a lot of other context to it, so I’ll include the important part…

There is a project like this in the pipeline, however, and I cannot wait for it to be unleashed on the unsuspecting cable subscriber.The show is True Blood and its creator is Alan Ball, who guided five dysfunctional years of Six Feet Under. It is an adaptation of cult writer Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire novels and stars Anna Paquin as tough-as-nails barmaid Sookie Stackhouse. Excited yet? What if I told you Sookie was telepathic and that the show takes place in a world where vampires have come “out of the coffin.”

Before you can claim that this is yet another instance of HBO’s misguided loyalty (as many felt with Deadwood creator David Milch’s difficult but underrated John from Cincinnati), I am here to say that it is not. This is the real, and really entertaining, deal.

I have read the pilot script and I must say that it is a big fat multi-layered club sandwich of brilliant. It’s a violent, visceral, sexy page-turner for sure; I can only imagine what it’ll be like when it’s realized visually.

Considering there’s no premiere date set (online reports indicate this fall but considering HBO’s juggernaut of a marketing department, you’d think we would have seen something by now), I won’t spill too many beans except to say that it’s the closest thing we have to a scary, funny successor to Buffy’s insurmountable genius. True Blood is self-referential without being obnoxious, the characters are genuine and it adds much to the mythology (in an opening scene we have an Ann Coulter?like vampire advocate spitting insults at Anderson Cooper), both in relation to the vampires and how humans deal with them.

True Blood is packed with the kind of itchy, must-see-next-week’s-episode agitation last experienced in season one of Lost; it’s the stuff heated message board posts are made of—and it’s looking more and more likely that a vampire show could bring HBO back from the dead. —dtaylor246@aol.com

About Jackie 3282 Articles
I am a 30-something SAHM with two adorable boys and a supportive husband who is very tolerant of my reading addiction. I love to read and easily go through about a dozen books a month – well I did before I had kids. Now, not so much. After my first son was born, I began to take my hobby of reviewing a little more serious and started Literary Escapism to help with my sanity. I love to discuss the fabulous novels I’ve read and meeting all the wonderful people in the book blogging community has been amazing.

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