Anna Paquin

Pilot Inspektor: HBO's "True Blood"

http://www.televisionaryblog.com/200...rue-blood.html

It's funny how your expectations can completely derail your perceptions of a series' strengths or weaknesses. As longtime readers of this site know, I have been beyond excited to watch the pilot for HBO's upcoming series True Blood since I first read the pilot script during the winter/spring of 2007. (Yes, it's really been that long since I first started blathering on about it.)

So imagine my shock and chagrin when I sat down to watch the pilot for True Blood--written and directed by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) and based on the novel series by Charlaine Harris--last week and was royally disappointed. Consider me a vampire faced with the prospect of feasting on an anorexic: all of the pieces were there but it was just flat, empty, and remarkably tasteless.

Sure, Anna Paquin (X-Men) is absolutely cute as a button as telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse; she's a blonde, perky barmaid at Merlotte's, a backwoods bar in post-Katrina Louisiana, and a social pariah, rejected by most of the townspeople for the unnerving way she is able to hear people's innermost thoughts in a constant cacophony of sordid audio details. But her luck takes a turn for the better when a vampire--named Bill, no less, and played by NY-LON's Stephen Moyer--comes into the bar one evening.

Sookie's amazed that she can't hear Bill Compton's thoughts and then is called upon to rescue him from some predatory lowlifes who want to drain him for his narcotic-like blood and sell the plasma to the highest bidder. (In this world, vampires have "come out of the coffin" and walk among humans, thanks to a Japanese-created synthetic blood called Tru Blood that's sold at most liquor stores.)

It's a convincing setup for a series that aims to be a mature, pay cable version of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer-meets-Dark Shadows or similar, but the inclusion of graphic sex into the mix makes the entire thing play more like soft-core porn. A storyline involving Sookie's lothario brother Jason (Summerland's Ryan Kwanten) having sex with local bad girl Maudette Pickens (Dirt's Danielle Sapia)--a woman addicted to having sex with vampires and filming it--turns into a gruesome S&M-charged affair that doesn't jibe at all well with the innocence of Sookie or the off-kilter humor of the rest of the episode. Maudette is found strangled and a tape of her having rough sex with Jason is found at the scene and he becomes the chief suspect in her murder... even though we now know there are several vampires hanging around town, including Bill and a mysterious female vampire who comes to Sookie's aid after she tries to free Bill.

(Aside: It bothered me that Maudette and Sookie supposedly went to high school together; the woman playing Maudette looks like she has about twenty years on Paquin and that little revelation threw me for a loop and took me off page for a few minutes.)

What I loved about the script was the interplay between the characters and how well each of the supporting characters were developed: how Sookie's boss Sam (Sam Trammell) sublimates his obvious desire for Sookie even though he's shouting his love for her inside her head; how alternately attracted and repelled Jason is by the notion of vampire sex; or how Sookie's friend Tara (Passions' Brook Kerr) can't censor her thoughts at all, either inside her head or when they're spoken aloud. But intsead, in the filmed version of the pilot, I find that none of the supporting characters are particularly sympathetic. They're all loud, irritating, and shrill. It's like they're all shouting all the time inside Sookie's head. Only, like Sookie, we're doomed to hear them all the damn time. (Kerr is definitely hellishly annoying; her Tara won't shut up for a single second she's on-screen.)

Tonally, the pilot was all over the place: a sex-fueled drama, off-kilter comedy, and a serious exploration of class warfare in small-town Americana after the storm. Then you throw in telepathy, vampires, and murder--not to mention some seriously cheesy special effects (they make the vampire transformation in Buffy look like the work of CGI geniuses)--and what you're left with is a bit of a muddle.

It's a bit of a headscratcher whether this will be seriously reworked (or, hell, completely reshot) before True Blood launches... well, whenever it will inevitably launch after such a long delay. But given the recent regime change at HBO, I wonder whether Sue Naegle will step in to fix this bloody awful mess. Pun definitely intended.