True Blood Season 3: It’s Like Twilight, but Good
If you haven’t noticed, vampires are in right now, and two of the hottest vampire properties are back this month with their third installments. Twilight returns with its third movie, Eclipse on later this month, and the third season of True Blood is premieres on HBO starting this Sunday on HBO. On the surface, the two seem to be extremely similar. Both center around a small-town girl’s romance with a glowery-yet-handsome vampire. Both include rivalries between vampires and werewolves. Both like to consider themselves more based around character than supernatural plot mechanics. Both are based on the new wave of hit “supernatural romance” novels. Both have epic powers of cheesiness and shirtless dudes. Despite all this, I cannot wait for True Blood and cannot stand Twlight, and I don’t think I’m alone. So, what’s the difference? Some spoilers for the first couple seasons of True Blood ahead!
True Blood is a series from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, based on the best-selling Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris. Anna Paquin stars as Sookie, a waitress with telepathic powers. She works at a bar called Merlotte’s in the town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. She falls for a vampire named Bill Compton, played by Stephen Moyer. Just before the series began, vampires “came out of the coffin” and made themselves known to the public, resulting in a great deal of tension between vampires and humans. In very vague terms the series is generally about how one small town adjusts to all the new weirdness.
The series is ridiculously over-the-top, but rather than playing it straight the way Twilight does it revels in its cheese. No piece of scenery is left without fang marks. Nearly every character sports a thick Southern drawl, which only adds to the silliness. Every time Bill says “Sookie” in a dramatic voice, which he does a lot, many of us crack up all over again. While Twilight is staunchly chaste, True Blood, like many HBO shows, revels in buckets of nudity, F-bombs, and bad behavior. The plots are labyrinthine and wonderfully batty. One of last season’s main plot-lines revolved around some sort of minotaur creature played by Michelle Forbes (ST:TNG, Battlestar Galactica) who tries to make the entire town into hedonistic sex zombies so that she can eat the heart of Sookie’s boss (because he can shapeshift into a dog, apparently) and summon the Greek God Bacchus so she can marry him. I think.
Sookie (Anna Paquin) and Jessica (Deborah Ann Wolf) are two of the characters that make "True Blood" worth watching.
The biggest advantage the series has over Twilight, however, is the characters. Bella is a vacant shell purposefully designed so any girl can picture herself in her shoes, but Sookie is a firebrand who always makes herself the center of attention. Last year, when asked by minotaur-gal “What are you?”, she famously spat back “I’m a waitress, what the f&#% are you?”
The show’s supporting cast has several members who on any other show would be considered the “break out character”. Alexander Skarsgard plays Eric Northman, the local vampire “Sheriff” who spent some time as a Viking back in the day. He is devious and imposing, and yet somehow seems to have some shred of humanity buried within him somewhere… and he has a thing for Sookie. He’s sort of the Spike to Bill Compton’s Angel, and it looks like he’ll have a bigger part than ever this year. Then there’s Ryan Kwanten as Sookie’s completely brainless, womanizing brother Jason. There’s Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette Reynolds, the cook at Merlotte’s, a gay African-American in the Deep South who somehow manages to remain the show’s voice of reason. And there’s Evan Rachel Wood in a scene-stealing turn as the Vampire Queen of Lousiana, who says “I haven’t enjoyed sex with men since the Eisenhower administration” and challenges all her visitors to games of Yahtzee.
My favorite character (and that of many fans as well) is probably Jessica, played by Deborah Ann Wolf. She’s an innocent teenager who suddenly finds herself turned into a vampire. Bill, as her sire (it’s a long story), is forced to look out for her and teach her how to be a vampire, but he is not very good at it. Her swings between glee in her new vampire powers, devastation at the negative aspects of her new life (Due to vampire healing, she finds she will always be a virgin. You know you always wondered.), youthful petulance, and sweet puppy love are incredibly endearing. This year she’ll have to deal with the consequences of giving in to temptation and eating her human boyfriend’s controlling mother in last year’s season finale.
The series has its annoying side, too. Season 2 spent way too much time on some plot-lines, like the doomed romance of Sookie’s best friend Tara (Rutina Wesley), and not enough on the cool vampires. Sookie’s brash behavior can comes off too often as suicidally stupid when she’s consistently placed in roomfuls of hungry vampires. The series’ use of the hatred against vampires as a metaphor for hatred against gay people (“God Hates Fangs”) and other oppressed minorities is drilled into our head a little too hard. And if you’re not the sort of person willing to just go with the silliness, there’s a chance you’ll think the series is just plain awful.
But True Blood‘s fans know it’s at its best when it embraces the crazy. You never have any idea what will happen next, and what does happen is usually somewhere between hilarious and weird. And I’ve come all this way without mentioning possibly my favorite opening credits of all time.Twilight takes itself too seriously to get even close to the amount of fun True Blood wrings out of its southern fried vampires. It’s the sort of series where the plot really isn’t the point, so there’s no reason not to tune in at the start of this year and find out what you’re missing.
True Blood returns to HBO this Sunday night at 9pm. You can check out six brief clips from the season premiere over at io9.com. Or you can just watch this cool trailer for Season 3 right now.
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