Night and day

In a small Louisiana town, a waitress’s customer hits on her. But this guy’s a bit different, so her friends give her fair warning: Don’t let him suck your blood.

HBO’s new series True Blood, created by Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball, takes place in the slightly fantastic modern day. A new commercially available synthetic blood allows vampires to attempt to join mainstream society. (They won’t bite people if they’ve got fake stuff to down.) Based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries books, the show follows the courtship between server Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer). Oh yeah, and Sookie can hear people’s thoughts.

After watching the first five episodes, our Time In critics had differing opinions.

Lyons I don’t know how you could watch this show and not be enthusiastic about watching more of it. It’s so sensuous and alluring. The racism/homophobia allegory—the bigotry directed at the vampires and those who associate with them—works better than I thought it would. And instead of recalling other fantasy or mythology-tinged shows, True Blood reminds me of Dexter. Part of that’s all the blood, but another part of it is the who’s-the-real-monster stuff: a serial killer who targets serial killers and humans just as damaged and lost as their immortal vampire counterparts.

Heisler I get that the show is beautiful: dark, silent, foreboding forests; Bill’s house decked out in textured gray paint and vintage furniture, straight out of a neo-goth nightmare. After an episode or two, though, “pretty” won’t keep me watching. And I agree that the show’s quite Dexter-y, but whereas Michael C. Hall’s tortured breeziness makes his madman immensely likable, Paquin can’t quite shift into gear. Her “I have a secret” face is oddly similar to both her “tell me a vampire secret and try to kiss me, Bill” face and her “your secrets terrify me” face. Sookie should be the reason we return, but after five episodes, she’s not much more than Paquin in sundresses and aprons.

Lyons Disagree. As the deeply conflicted Southern belle, Paquin is surprisingly credible. What I like about the way she plays Sookie is that she’s so open to (for lack of a better word) magic, as she eschews any sense of irony. That’s one of the things I’m really cheesed about with True Blood—how frankly and fully it inhabits this weird, parallelish universe. There are vampires, there’s telepathy, but there are also, like, cell phones and shitty beer.

Heisler True, and for me, the most interesting parts of the show are when the two collide—which happens quite rarely. For the most part, the vampire-human worlds are dichotomous: We do this, they do that; it’s scary when they’re here, it’s scary when I’m there. The only exception is the stuff surrounding V, the druglike vampire blood that’s part Ecstasy and part shrooms. It factors heavily into the sex-with-vampires subplot, which—and I never thought I’d say this—is getting tired.

Lyons I’m with you on that part. There sure is a lot of fucking on this show, and it does get boring. The vampire underworld is super BDSM-themed, and the sex scenes are very much about dominance; there’s even a rape-play scene. Obviously, vampire mythology uses elements of surrender, of master/pawn, of defiling the sweet young thing, but it does get repetitive here and doesn’t relate to the larger story.

Heisler This isn’t a series I’d watch week to week. When I first heard about True Blood, I assumed it was an extended miniseries—like its HBO predecessors Generation Kill and John Adams. And it would have worked well with an end date. So given that it’s locked in for at least 12 episodes, who is the anchor? Sookie’s brother Jason’s sexcapades are a focal point, but Ryan Kwanten’s poor-me performance grows old. And Moyer’s Bill keeps his cards way too close to his chest: Mysterious? Yes, but he doesn’t get any good lines. Yet I do love Nelsan Ellis as Sookie’s flamboyant, makeup-wearing coworker Lafayette. It’s interesting to see how the townspeople treat this outcast versus the outcasts related to the Count.

Lyons I’m definitely on board at least for a season, but I agree that the show is struggling to find a real center, an emotional identity. What’s True Blood about, really? Outsiders? The unexplainable? Modernity versus tradition? I hope it decides on its themes and starts pursuing them, but in the meantime, being about sexy vampires is enough.

True Blood vants to suck your blahd Sunday 7 at 8pm on HBO.