In the beginning, the goofy premise of "what if vampires really existed, and a lot of them were all congregated in Louisiana?" felt more like an interesting twist to telling the stories of these people in Louisiana. "True Blood" did not feel like "that vampire show." It felt like "that show with the weirdos in Louisiana that also has vampires thrown in as a gimmick."
The time spent on the vampires felt like "True Blood" knew it needed to earn its quirkiness by fleshing out characters like Vampire Bill and Sheriff Eric. The exploration into vampire blood actually being addictive to humans felt somewhat plausible as an intriguing trope further into vampire culture.
As we dove more into vampire culture, even more great characters resulted. This was in no small part to the excellent acting of many of the supporting characters. Sure, Anna Paquin has never had to flex her acting muscles much in "True Blood," which might be due to her character being written as vacillating between mooning over a potential love interest to feeling the need to put herself in harm's way again and again for no particular reason.
And Tara is one of the most annoying characters in television, one that I have been begging for the writers to kill since episode one. She comes off as even more ignorant than Sookie because her character so blindly has no direction in life that Tara often goes headlong into conflict with little to no motivation at all. She, then, changes course throughout for no reason either.
But Stephen Moyer as Vampire Bill has held the show together at times. He is like the Professor X of "True Blood," and his mission of having vampires and humans live in harmony together is as compelling here as it is with mutants and humans in the X-Men universe.
Alexander Skarsgard has always been the show's highlight as Eric. He strikes that cool anti-hero vibe, providing a fascinating foil to Bill's propriety.
And the show unearthed interesting characters like the vampire queen of Louisiana (Evan Rachel Wood) and the vampire king of Mississippi (Denis O'Hare). As silly as it is to introduce a vampire monarchy, Wood's performance proves that she should only be allowed to play blood-thirsty villains. Wood seemed to revel in the role on-screen with her energy. O'Hare, likewise, came off as a more prim and proper Bill but with much more insidious tendencies. Having those two characters around always presented the possibility of a wild card, so it sucks that they are dead.
The show is at its best when it focuses on the people in Louisiana and fleshes out the vampires involved to where they become essentially just people too.
But now "True Blood" is fixated on introducing more and more supernatural elements for the sheer shock of it all. The fact that the current season began with a scene or two about the fact that Sookie is now a fairy — and then forgot about fairies completely for the rest of the season thus far — smacks of poor writing. The supposed transformation of Sookie's brother, Jason, into a were-panther (rather than werewolf, for some reason) was abruptly dropped and not even explained away well.
And the current season-long arc around witches and mediums and revenge from the past is just dull because the viewer knows little about the main character involved. It's all just smoke and mirrors.
If that was not enough, "True Blood" has gone out of its way to neuter its greatest strength. Eric got amnesia this season — as if this show did not feel like a soap opera already — thus negating all the edge of Eric's character so far, all for the singular purpose of allowing fanboys to see Sookie and Eric make love. Sookie, who the viewer is supposed to be rooting for, just comes off as disturbed for preferring a man when he is brain damaged than when he is his true self. Other budding romances, like Jessica and Jason, have even less story to back them up. They are just physical attractions from an artificial connection through vampire blood. How romantic.
No, the show is at its best with episodes like when the viewer learned about Bill's past life or Eric's maker, Godric. Those were stories with emotion and stakes. "True Blood" would do best to go back to that and forget about witches, mediums, were-panthers, fairies, shifters and so on. And for the love of God, don't introduce another one next season.
— Robby O'Daniel is a graduate student in communications. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.