Here There and Everywhere

TrueBlood

For so many reasons, we thank God for our son, and one of the most trivial – but most fun – is that he introduces us to series we love, like The Wire, like My Name is Earl, and like True Blood..

Sookie - Anna Paquin

You would not think True Blood is the kind of HBO drama that would appeal to seriously grown-up people like AdventureMan and me. I mean honestly, vampires have “come out of the coffin” because blood has been synthesized, and they no longer need human victims. Sounds pretty far fetched, doesn’t it? And the main character, a lovely and a little spacy waitress named Sookie, has a bad habit of overhearing other people’s thoughts . . . and then, she saves a vampire’s life and they fall in love . . . It all sounds like something we would not find interesting, doesn’t it?

True Blood is totally addictive. We watched it with our son and his wife, the way we do with other series, two or three a night. When it came time we really really really needed to go to be, we all groaned, and looked forward to the next night. The writing is that good. The series is very funny, at times gruesome, and WARNING, the sex is energetic, in-your-face and frequent. The writers are good – even great. You find yourself repeating the lines – some of the lines are totally priceless.

There are so many great pieces of writing, small jokes, funny self-deprecating humor – but our all time, hands-down favorite is when one of the waitresses talks about a fight she had with her boyfriend and says “Fine! Men always say ‘fine!’ and walk away! If every fight is going to end in ‘fine!’ why do they even bother arguing in the first place?” We totally love that line.

Part of the funkiness of the whole vampire-in-real-life scene is the setting, in Bon Temps, Louisiana, and all the Southern accents, Cajun characters – and vampires, etc. Bee-yill, (Bill), Sookie’s vampire heartthrob, is a Civil War veteran, who speaks to her Grandmother’s group, the Descendants of the Glorious Dead. I mean the writing is FUNNY! AdventureMan says it would be better to be a vampire in places like Seattle, where the weather is gloomy and dark, but he forgets that in summer, the sun doesn’t go down until 10 at night, so vampires might do all right in the winter, but the summers would, ahem, fry them.

The characters have some of that deep southern charm, they have known each other most of their lives, they talk about the people they come from. Sookie’s sex-addicted brother is twice accused of murder, and begins to believe (he is not too bright) that maybe he is the murderer. There is a lot of anti-Vampire rhetoric, while the Vampires are fighting for “equal rights.” We don’t really know what those rights are – the right to vote? to marry? to own property? Do the dead have equal rights to the living? Some interesting areas for thought . . .

The themes are adult, and – well, vampires are a dark subject. These episodes are not something you want to watch with children around. Nonetheless, there manages to be moments of utter hilarity, and the good manage to maintain their goodness, even in the face of evil. We love the writing. We can’t wait for the next season.

December 13, 2008 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Entertainment, Family Issues, Free Speech, Friends & Friendship, Generational, Health Issues, Law and Order | Vampires