In Defense of True Blood
Oct. 15th, 2008 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebeWow! Thanks a lot for the writing exercise suggestions guys. :) I'll be trying them out once a week and posting them up to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
writerrabbit. If you catch me skipping, please kick my butt.
So this is an attempt at TV criticism. It's a bit long (~1500 words) and I'm not sure about the quality, but here you go.
Maybe it's because I'm not in the right internet circles, but almost no one seems to be talking about True Blood, the latest vampire soap opera/drama/comedy to come to television. I've only heard one mention of it on my friend's list, and that wasathelind's abandoning of it for the fairly legitimate reason of "way too much sex." I'm guessing one big reason no one's watching it is because no one has HBO, but with torrenting and online viewing services and iTunes and everything else, there's a billion other ways to watch it given the right motivation.
It's true that the show won't be for everyone; I really didn't give a fig about it when the advertisements started popping up. Another oversexed vampire show with attractive young things hooking up and dealing with the usual tired, post-teenaged angst? No thank you. Vampires have never been interesting to me; even Buffy and Angel only made them tolerable at best. (Those shows worked best, by the way, when they grew out of the 'vampire hunter' business into the broader world of the supernatural.) After Anne Rice hit it big with her vampire novels and White Wolf popped onto the map with Vampire: the Masquerade, they became inescapable, and what was a casual indifference grew into a bemused annoyance and finally exasperation. To me, vampires are one of those classic monsters whose time has come and gone. Whatever it is they're supposed to represent can find another beastie to express itself, I'm sure. But enough with the bloodsucking and pale skin and stylish brooding already.
Ryan was interested in the show, though, so I had to give it a shot. The pedigree helped a little -- the showrunner is one Alan Ball, he of American Beauty and Six Feet Under fame. Even if he couldn't make vampires cool, at least he knew his way around the peripheries of the mythos. Death, desire, broken psychology are all pretty big things with him. Maybe I could find a couple of characters to latch onto and tolerate the vamps the way I tolerated Angel.
It turns out all of the characters -- even the vampire -- is interesting. Our heroine is Sookie Stackhouse, a fearless lady of the new South. She's a bundle of contradictions, like most of the folks who populate the little town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. She's opinionated, almost prudish, yet she has a fondness for really short shorts and shirts with necklines that plunge just enough to reveal something. While she doesn't mind being showy, she does mind people with no regard for proper decorum. This might be perhaps because she's psychic, able to read the internal monologues of everyone around her. It's more of a curse than a blessing; she has to concentrate to keep the voices out. Have you ever noticed, by the way, how all genre stuff sounds really lame when you're trying to describe it?
Sookie meets up with a mysterious vampire who's recently come to claim ownership of the old Compton mansion. He's able to do this because vampires have recently 'come out of the coffin.' With the introduction of a synthetic blood alternative, vampires no longer have to hide their true natures from the populace that would normally be prey. Bill -- and this show instantly earns points by naming the mysterious, brooding stranger something so pedestrian -- is aiming to go mainstream, incorporating himself into town as a 'normal' member of society. Of course, being who he is normal is more a matter of degrees than a fixed quantity.
The relationship that blossoms between Bill and Sookie is met with almost universal disapproval from her friends. Tara, her bff, thinks she's a fool but is there as support no matter what happens. Sam, her boss, thinks Bill is dangerous and wrong for her, but given that he's been mooning over Sookie for a long time it's safe to say he's a bit biased. Jason, her brother, hates vampires in general, and the other waitresses at Merlotte's bar -- or anyone else in town -- don't think much of it either. Only Gran is approving, and she takes an instant shine to Bill.
What makes the series so impressive is its very unique sense of place. Asking us to swallow vampires integrating themselves into mainstream society is a high concept for us to swallow, but it's grounded by creating a world that doesn't get seen all that often and making it as authentic as possible. From Merlotte's mobile-home-turned-bar to Gran's iron-skillet cooking to the heavy accents and old, nosy ladies, the series is incredibly Southern. The complexity of the characters save them from being stereotypes, but the broad, heavy brush they use to paint the environment makes the show distinctive and oddly realistic.
Everyone's buzzing about vampires. What legends are true? Which aren't? Bill is incredibly long-suffering in affirming or debunking the theories that Sookie and others come up with, and you almost feel sorry for him after a while. He's polite to almost everyone, especially Sookie, and he courts her in the most quaint and endearingly old-fashioned way. He doesn't have a problem with glamouring cops into leaving him alone, though, or claiming Sookie as his when he's around other vamps. Like almost everyone in this little town, there are so many sides to Bill, and you're never quite sure which one you're going to get.
The show makes good practice of peeling back the layers of the world bit by bit. In one episode we get a few of the ground rules for how vampires work, and in another we take a small peek into how their social structure works. At the same time, we get a little glimpse of how vampires outing themselves have affected the culture at large...well, through the very strong prism of Bon Temps. A vampire club in Monroe (which is the biggest city nearby; I'm sure they had their reasons for staying out of New Orleans, and I'm glad they did) attracts not only vampires looking for semi-willing victims but the groupies that have sprung up to make their dreams come true...whatever they are. It's tempting to look down on these little posers, but you have to wonder where you'd be if furries were suddenly real and there was a club nearby where they were known to gather.
While she's in Fangtasia (a delightfully cheesy name for a vampire club), Sookie mentions that everyone's thinking about 'sex, sex, sex.' That's true of her community back home, too. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say at least half of every episode is dedicated to who's hooking up with who at any given moment. While the sheer amount of carnal tomfoolery stretches credibility (and yes, sometimes patience), you have to remember the source material. True Blood, after all, is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. They have names like Club Dead and Dead to the World. They're very firmly in that supernatural mystery-romance genre that's taking off these days. You take novels like that, give it to Alan Ball, who's featured a hyperintelligent sex addict and older men with mid-life crises brought on by pretty little girls in previous works, and you put it on a network like HBO, home of Tell Me You Love Me. What would you imagine a show like that to look like?
Yes, there's a lot of sex. But what elevates the series above its trashy nature is its treatment of its characters and the fact that not once has someone's nature been sacrificed for the sake of the pairing. Yes, these are horny people, but they're also lonely and burdened with the weight of their memories and secrets. I've known a lot of people like them who mistake sex as some kind of ultimate connection. It's not annoying to me to watch this unfolding; it's fascinating and a little sad. Yes, these people are horny, one-minded idiots, but their fumbling through the world looking for something to feel good about is actually kind of endearing. The show's writers have done such a great job making them feel real so quickly that they're already just good friends and people who have a surprising capacity to make the worst decisions. Everyone, including Sookie, seems to be fighting against their baser natures to do the right thing. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose.
I'm not going to lie. True Blood is trash television that glories in its trashiness and does it incredibly well. It's a guilty pleasure for me, sure, but it's also become one of the few appointments with the boob tube that I have to meet every week. This despite (or perhaps because of) its flaws. If you're looking to spend an hour with a fun diversion, there are many much worse options out there.
writerrabbit. If you catch me skipping, please kick my butt. So this is an attempt at TV criticism. It's a bit long (~1500 words) and I'm not sure about the quality, but here you go.
Maybe it's because I'm not in the right internet circles, but almost no one seems to be talking about True Blood, the latest vampire soap opera/drama/comedy to come to television. I've only heard one mention of it on my friend's list, and that was
athelind's abandoning of it for the fairly legitimate reason of "way too much sex." I'm guessing one big reason no one's watching it is because no one has HBO, but with torrenting and online viewing services and iTunes and everything else, there's a billion other ways to watch it given the right motivation.It's true that the show won't be for everyone; I really didn't give a fig about it when the advertisements started popping up. Another oversexed vampire show with attractive young things hooking up and dealing with the usual tired, post-teenaged angst? No thank you. Vampires have never been interesting to me; even Buffy and Angel only made them tolerable at best. (Those shows worked best, by the way, when they grew out of the 'vampire hunter' business into the broader world of the supernatural.) After Anne Rice hit it big with her vampire novels and White Wolf popped onto the map with Vampire: the Masquerade, they became inescapable, and what was a casual indifference grew into a bemused annoyance and finally exasperation. To me, vampires are one of those classic monsters whose time has come and gone. Whatever it is they're supposed to represent can find another beastie to express itself, I'm sure. But enough with the bloodsucking and pale skin and stylish brooding already.
Ryan was interested in the show, though, so I had to give it a shot. The pedigree helped a little -- the showrunner is one Alan Ball, he of American Beauty and Six Feet Under fame. Even if he couldn't make vampires cool, at least he knew his way around the peripheries of the mythos. Death, desire, broken psychology are all pretty big things with him. Maybe I could find a couple of characters to latch onto and tolerate the vamps the way I tolerated Angel.
It turns out all of the characters -- even the vampire -- is interesting. Our heroine is Sookie Stackhouse, a fearless lady of the new South. She's a bundle of contradictions, like most of the folks who populate the little town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. She's opinionated, almost prudish, yet she has a fondness for really short shorts and shirts with necklines that plunge just enough to reveal something. While she doesn't mind being showy, she does mind people with no regard for proper decorum. This might be perhaps because she's psychic, able to read the internal monologues of everyone around her. It's more of a curse than a blessing; she has to concentrate to keep the voices out. Have you ever noticed, by the way, how all genre stuff sounds really lame when you're trying to describe it?
Sookie meets up with a mysterious vampire who's recently come to claim ownership of the old Compton mansion. He's able to do this because vampires have recently 'come out of the coffin.' With the introduction of a synthetic blood alternative, vampires no longer have to hide their true natures from the populace that would normally be prey. Bill -- and this show instantly earns points by naming the mysterious, brooding stranger something so pedestrian -- is aiming to go mainstream, incorporating himself into town as a 'normal' member of society. Of course, being who he is normal is more a matter of degrees than a fixed quantity.
The relationship that blossoms between Bill and Sookie is met with almost universal disapproval from her friends. Tara, her bff, thinks she's a fool but is there as support no matter what happens. Sam, her boss, thinks Bill is dangerous and wrong for her, but given that he's been mooning over Sookie for a long time it's safe to say he's a bit biased. Jason, her brother, hates vampires in general, and the other waitresses at Merlotte's bar -- or anyone else in town -- don't think much of it either. Only Gran is approving, and she takes an instant shine to Bill.
What makes the series so impressive is its very unique sense of place. Asking us to swallow vampires integrating themselves into mainstream society is a high concept for us to swallow, but it's grounded by creating a world that doesn't get seen all that often and making it as authentic as possible. From Merlotte's mobile-home-turned-bar to Gran's iron-skillet cooking to the heavy accents and old, nosy ladies, the series is incredibly Southern. The complexity of the characters save them from being stereotypes, but the broad, heavy brush they use to paint the environment makes the show distinctive and oddly realistic.
Everyone's buzzing about vampires. What legends are true? Which aren't? Bill is incredibly long-suffering in affirming or debunking the theories that Sookie and others come up with, and you almost feel sorry for him after a while. He's polite to almost everyone, especially Sookie, and he courts her in the most quaint and endearingly old-fashioned way. He doesn't have a problem with glamouring cops into leaving him alone, though, or claiming Sookie as his when he's around other vamps. Like almost everyone in this little town, there are so many sides to Bill, and you're never quite sure which one you're going to get.
The show makes good practice of peeling back the layers of the world bit by bit. In one episode we get a few of the ground rules for how vampires work, and in another we take a small peek into how their social structure works. At the same time, we get a little glimpse of how vampires outing themselves have affected the culture at large...well, through the very strong prism of Bon Temps. A vampire club in Monroe (which is the biggest city nearby; I'm sure they had their reasons for staying out of New Orleans, and I'm glad they did) attracts not only vampires looking for semi-willing victims but the groupies that have sprung up to make their dreams come true...whatever they are. It's tempting to look down on these little posers, but you have to wonder where you'd be if furries were suddenly real and there was a club nearby where they were known to gather.
While she's in Fangtasia (a delightfully cheesy name for a vampire club), Sookie mentions that everyone's thinking about 'sex, sex, sex.' That's true of her community back home, too. I don't think it'd be a stretch to say at least half of every episode is dedicated to who's hooking up with who at any given moment. While the sheer amount of carnal tomfoolery stretches credibility (and yes, sometimes patience), you have to remember the source material. True Blood, after all, is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. They have names like Club Dead and Dead to the World. They're very firmly in that supernatural mystery-romance genre that's taking off these days. You take novels like that, give it to Alan Ball, who's featured a hyperintelligent sex addict and older men with mid-life crises brought on by pretty little girls in previous works, and you put it on a network like HBO, home of Tell Me You Love Me. What would you imagine a show like that to look like?
Yes, there's a lot of sex. But what elevates the series above its trashy nature is its treatment of its characters and the fact that not once has someone's nature been sacrificed for the sake of the pairing. Yes, these are horny people, but they're also lonely and burdened with the weight of their memories and secrets. I've known a lot of people like them who mistake sex as some kind of ultimate connection. It's not annoying to me to watch this unfolding; it's fascinating and a little sad. Yes, these people are horny, one-minded idiots, but their fumbling through the world looking for something to feel good about is actually kind of endearing. The show's writers have done such a great job making them feel real so quickly that they're already just good friends and people who have a surprising capacity to make the worst decisions. Everyone, including Sookie, seems to be fighting against their baser natures to do the right thing. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose.
I'm not going to lie. True Blood is trash television that glories in its trashiness and does it incredibly well. It's a guilty pleasure for me, sure, but it's also become one of the few appointments with the boob tube that I have to meet every week. This despite (or perhaps because of) its flaws. If you're looking to spend an hour with a fun diversion, there are many much worse options out there.
