Chatterbox Sara's couch potato critique of True Blood

Ok, so Hi Hi Again! Injum Jim and I decided that our next blog posts would be about the new HBO "Sensational Show" True Blood. Here's a basic synopsis- True Blood is based on a series of books called The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. It centers around a romance between the heroine Sookie Stackhouse (for real thats the characters name) and her vampire paramour Bill Compton. Vampires are now "out of the closet" so to speak as a legit minority group because Japanese scientists have made a synthetic blood like beverage that vampires can drink instead of drinking human or animal blood. That's the little catch though- they don't NEED to drink human blood, but they can still WANT to- its a moral choice. Bill and Sookie live in a Louisianna bayou town called Bon Temps and there encounter all sorts of troubles as their romance progresses. Oh and Sookie is telepathic.

Soooo, I'm having a really hard time with this show. I mean, I really adore mindless brain trash. Hence, my rewatching of America's Next Top Model marathons on VH1 (sorry Injum Jim) antime it comes across my radar that its on. I also adore pseudo "deep" television viewing, well I mean who am I kidding- my ass isn't expanding on its own- clearly I watch too much tv. Ok, so I read the whole Twilight/Stephenie Meyer series. I even blogged on my other blog about its lameness. I mean, please, there are now little vigilante groups of stay at home mothers totally obsessed with the character Edward and how he is the "perfect man", and they are encouraging their daughters to obsess about these stupid damned books.

The cultish appeal of the Twilight saga books is lost on me. I get total mass media frenzy and I get being addicted to mainstream pop addictions- hello I read the Gossip Girls books like they were literature crack/cocaine. But I just could not get into the whole Twilight thing. Sadly, I am totally a sci-fi-fantasy fiction freak. Maybe the appeal of it all is lost on me because I don't get into any story line where people torture themselves and the person they love because of their "deep and profound" love for one another. I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights, or really anything by either of the Bronte sisters. Love is complicated, yes, but does one really need to be some sort of emotional fuck up just to experience deep and profound love? Do we really need to screw over every other aspect of our lives just to feel the "realness" of love?

I think not.

I think that that ideology is something that perpetuates higher than absolutely tolerable divorce rates in the Westernized world.

Yeah, go shoot me with your NRA approved guns. Then cut my hands off for voting in favor of abortion clinics.


Back to the topic at hand. True Blood. Conceptually, this show could go places. Really, its kind of cool. Simulated blood? New minority groups? Vampire/telepathic human love line? There's all sorts of cool places this could go. Sadly, I'm not sure it'll ever go anywhere cool. Why? Gawd, where do I start? Let me start with the wierd heavy handed innuendos that kind of associate vampire as the new "homosexuals coming out of the closet" application. I don't know that you can really view vampires- basically blood sucking undeads- to people who have struggled in their inner most parts of their souls with something that challenges their own assumptions of their identity and other peoples as well. I mean, this isn't Angels in America, people. This is southern bayou inbreds being prejudiced against vampires.

Oh and let me say that that is one of the more interesting tension points of the story line- a people riddled with insecurities and stigmas and stereotypes being against a minority group. But whereas that point could really go places, it just kind of falls flat and I think its because the strengths of the cast don't lie where they need to. Take the vampire paramour- Bill- this dude walked straight out of the Buffy the Vampire Acting School down to the local pharmacy to pick up some Ativan and then flushed the Ativan down the toilet just to feel a little more tortured. SEriously, he's brooding to the point of comical. I half expect a drumroll after each of his lines.

Then there's Anna Paquin. I believe Injun Jims going to wax poetic on her but lets just say that I think the character of Sookie (pronounced Suckie- snicker snicker) is probably much more amazing in Harris' books than Paquin's dramatic interpretation of this character. It's really clear that Paquin isn't Southern- her accent is atrocious. It's also really apparent that she should not be blonde, should not stick her butt out to walk, and should not attempt to get flustered in a rhetorically "Southern" way because she just kind of looks like a valley girl who is strung out that ate a bunch of pixie sticks.

The dialogue in this show is fairly humourous- I'm not sure in a good way though. There are parts that are genuinely witty- but those parts are usually from side characters, like her dimwitted lothario bro Jason or her spitfire best friend Tarah. In one of the episodes, Tarah waxes bitchily poetic on the fact that she is a black woman named after the Tarah plantation in Gone With the Wind- that was pretty funny in a literary geek kind of way. There is a part where Jason the loser lothario is banging some waitress and points to himself in the mirror and mouths "I'm the man!" that was really funny. There's a gay line cook at the bar that they work at that has a few too many zingers and a few too few moments onscreen. The opening credits are awesome- the song with some bum crooning "I want to do bad things to do" makes me want to pick up a banjo and strum it Deliverance style.

See, thats where this thing went wrong. Think about Deliverance- it really capitalized on stereotypes and grim humor and sadism. This show could take off if it went THERE- got down and dirty with the stereotypes and the shocking moments- all that jazz- instead of being some pseudo biblical allegory packaged under an otherworldly romance story line. Imagine if all the characters REALLY wear inbred and really did still partake in lynchings and if Sookie really did wear blue eyeshadow and booty shorts to church. Then we'd be going places.

As it is, in my camp the jury is still out if this show can turn itself around and bite into a big bloody vein of goodness. As of right now, its good for a laugh and more than its fair share of eyeball rolls, but as long as I'm hearing people say "I dont think Jeeeezuuhhhzz woulda minded vampires.", I may as well drink Bloody Marys and shop online at Jcrew during each episode just to get my blood flowing.

Tee hee hee.