True Blood: Strange Love

by Teresa Jusino

Trashy.  Sexy.  Southern.  Fun. All these words accurately describe HBO’s latest original offering, True Blood, which premiered this week.  Anna Paquin stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress at a diner in Bon Temps, LA who also happens to be able to read people’s thoughts. At the start of the show, it is two years after the “Great Revelation”, or the time when the invention of Tru Blood, a synthetic blood product, allowed vampires to reveal themselves and begin to live openly in mainstream society.  Everyone has formed an opinion about vampires, and Sookie sees in them the prospect of excitement in her sleepy town.  When a vampire named Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) shows up at the diner, Sookie is entranced.  She is drawn by the fact that she can’t hear his thoughts, reveling in the pure quiet of being around him.  He is taken aback by her giddy tolerance of him, at once confused by and attracted to her.  He ends up being her damsel in distress, however, when a local team of husband and wife “vampire drainers” lure and capture him in an attempt to steal his blood, which acts as a drug for humans.  Sookie fights them off in a surprising show of competence with a chain, but later suffers greatly for it.  Meanwhile, Sookie’s brother, Jason (played by Ryan Kwanten), ends up being a suspect in the murder of a local woman named Maudette, with whom he’d been having rough, vampire-inspired sex just before she died.

And all Sookie and Jason’s grandmother wants is for the new vampire that Sookie’s met to speak to the Daughters of the Glorious Dead about his experiences during the Civil War!

True Blood is primarily a drama, but the best thing about the show is how it embraces what’s funny about vampire mythology.  The melodrama!  The fangs!  The crazy-intense sexuality!  Whereas most stories about vampires take their dark, gothic elements way too seriously, True Blood acknowledges how silly it all is.  By bringing vampires into the open and setting this story in the gothiest location possible, True Blood allows nonchalance about them and allows us to laugh at things like the lingering, trance-like gazes between Sookie and Bill.  At one point, Sookie makes fun of how commonplace Bill’s name is, saying she expected something like “Antoine.”  Parts of the show are cheesy, but they’re purposely cheesy, especially where vampires are concerned.  This is all, of course, to make us comfortable; to make us see vampires as human and harmless…just before they lash out.  I think a lot of reviewers who have more mixed things to say about the show do so because they were expecting more frightening and less funny, but I find this approach to vampires refreshing.  An early scene in the diner where dirty talk is being bandied about in front of an embarrassed, virginal Sookie is a hilarious highlight.  Sookie asserting herself while confronting Tara’s and her boss Sam’s thoughts out loud is another.  And after all that funny, the episode’s brutal ending completely blindsides us as it does Sookie, and has me sitting on the edge of my couch for next week’s episode.

Then there’s the fabulous cast and the most colorful group of characters I’ve seen in a long time!  What is it about a Southern setting that makes characters so much larger than life?  Anna Paquin is a complex and interesting Sookie, effectively reconciling wide-eyed innocence with inner steel.  I would totally fangbang Stephen Moyer’s Bill…but more than that, he’s a solid actor who conveys much with few words.  But as much as this is a show “about” the relationship between Sookie and Bill, it’s also about the town and its intriguing inhabitants.  Rutina Wesley as Sookie’s best friend, Tara, is a standout, and I’m looking forward to her ranting every week.  We should all quit our jobs with such glorious fury!  Also worth mentioning is Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette Reynolds, the delightfully flamboyant cook at the diner whom everyone wants to bed….at least, according to him.

If you’re coming to True Blood expecting standard “Vampire Lestat” nonsense, you’re coming to the wrong place.  If you’re expecting Buffy-speak, go back to your DVD collection and look for it there.  True Blood takes us from serious to sexy to funny to brutally violent at the drop of a dime.  It’s completely trashy, but in the best possible way.  It’s not like any other show, vampire or otherwise, that you’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely worth a watch.

Though I must say, I will be very happy once the cast gets their Southern accents straight!

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. Also, she has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which is now being rivaled by her burgeoning crush on Robert Downey Jr. in his Iron Man suit.

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