A Statement About True Blood

Okie doke, so this is going to be a potential cross-over post with that other blog I'm working on, but bear with me, because my worlds are about to collide.

True Blood came out on DVD last week, and lo and behold, the best library in the state (HAPLR, shmAPLR, I say to you) instantly had it available for staff consumption. You know, because we're that good. I started watching it, as I do, and at about three-quarters of the way through, have formed what I consider to be an educated opinion.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, it's more vamps vamps vamps, this time in Louisiana, this time "outed" to society, this time drinking bottles of blood in bars the way humans drink beer. No more secret societies, just vamps looking to live as (sometimes) healthy and productive members of society. Sometimes.

Enter Bill Compton, Civil War vet-turned-vamp who comes Back Home, to his family plantation from back in the day. Enter Sookie (rhymes with cookie) Stackhouse, virgin, waitress, telepath, naive southern belle. They are surrounded by the requisite cast of characters-- Sookie's friend Tara (filling the role of the Angry Black Best Friend), Sookie's brother Jason (the Neglected Ne'er Do Well), Sam the bar owner (who is madly in love with Sookie, but sleeping with Tara to soothe his... pain) Vamps who are good (mostly just Bill) and vamps who are bad ("mainstreaming" is for losers). Are we all stocked up? Good. I'm glad we didn't miss anyone.

A word about Sookie. Over at that other blog, my partner in crime and I just had a (relatively) spirited discussion about the Heroine (let me back up: this show is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which fall loosely between the romance and mystery sections at your favorite bookseller). The evolution of the Romance Heroine has been marked in the past decade. Virgins are out, relatively experienced, gutsy broads (with interesting occupations!) are in. Which means that poor Sookie is way, way out.

It's intriguing to me how literally HBO and the show's creator, Alan Ball, are interpretting the romance novel cliches. I mean, I swear to God, the last ep I watched had newly de-virginized Sookie asking Bill if it's "always this way," and insisting that he tell her if she's doing something wrong. Bor-ing. Not to mention the cliches she herself has racked up: virgin because she could always here the thoughts of the boys trying to get in her pants, sexually abused as a child by her grandmother's brother, suddenly intrigued by a pale and very (literally) cold stranger who has just strolled into town.

I have often said that the Black Dagger Brotherhood books are everything Twilight should have been if they had, you know... been better. True Blood is everything Twilight would have been if they had been written by a romance novelist and not a Mormon (not that romance novelists can't be Mormons, too, but the ones who aren't don't necessarily have religious strictures to adhere to).

As a show True Blood is hard not to watch, but just because it's crackalicious doesn't make it good, too.