True Blood: Strange Love Review

It’s time to come out of the coffin, folks.  Vampires deserve to have the same rights as everyone else.  The right to a good job, equal pay, the right to vote and the right to date outside their “species.” It’s a brave new world on HBO’s True Blood.

I got a sneak peek at the first episode, “Strange Love” and frankly, I’m sitting on the fence after watching it.

On the upside, I love the whole “why can’t we just get along” plot point. Stores stocking Tru Blood, a synthetic blood substitute, places with a “no vampires” policy, vampire pick-up bars — it’s clever stuff. It’s also clever in the way that it paints humans as the real villains — because ain’t that the truth.

The first episode sets up a number of storylines along with the introduction of way too many characters. There are so many people with so many different relationships, I couldn’t keep them all straight.

The lead character is Sookie Stackhouse (Ana Paquin).  She has that early Buffy Summers vibe going for her; one-part innocence mixed with two parts crusader, mixed with one part crazy. She’s a waitress in a bar and oh, yes, she can hear what people are thinking. But she can’t hear what vampires are thinking and that delights her to no end when she finally comes across one.

The one, is Bill (Stephen Moyer), a 173-year-old vampire who stops by the sleepy, little Louisiana town looking for. . . actually, we don’t really know what he’s looking for.  But what he finds is Sookie and they’re soon bonding over man’s inhumanity to man, particularly dead men who still walk the earth.

This is where I start to fall off the fence. I don’t find Bill sexy. No offense to the actor, but he does nothing for me and where that might not be an issue in a comedy or a cop show, this is, predominately, a romance.  Doesn’t work.

Another thing that didn’t work for me was the full frontal nudity and graphic sex scene.  It left me rushing for the remote control as I had a teenager in the house, though luckily not watching with me. My own fault, I guess, for not realizing that I’d encounter these kinds of scenes in a cable vampire series and in the future, I’ll be sure to watch the show in the bedroom and not the living room! Still, the whole scene felt kind of gratuitous to me, as if it was put there just to remind you that this is HBO and not CBS.

Still, it wasn’t all bad.  I loved the quirky style, the murder mystery plot and the sense of humor.  It was like Twin Peaks or a ghoulish Northern Exposure.  And as crazy as this is going to sound, I kept thinking Gilmore Girls in the Bayou.  I have no idea why.

Bottom line?  I’m a vampire fan from way back, Buffy, Moonlight, Dark Shadows, Forever Knight,  so I really wanted to like this new series but it simply didn’t connect. 

You can see the series premiere of True Blood on HBO, starting September 7th  at 9:00 and repeating eight more times throughout the week. Catch one, then come back here and tell me what you think of this latest addition to the vampire landscape on TV.