When you think of HBO, “cult TV” is probably one of the last
things you think of. Back in the early
days of HBO original programming, before “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” became their
mantra, HBO gave us several cult/genre series, led by the anthology series Tales from the Crypt, which lasted seven
seasons (plus two theatrical films: Demon
Knight and Bordello of Blood). In addition, HBO gave us three seasons of the
Spawn animated series with Keith
David, plus short-lived cult comedies as Mr.
Show and Tenacious D. But, triggered by the one-two punch of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, HBO aggressively rebranded itself as the home of
prestige television, opting for high-caliber writers and Emmy wins over
anything that could remotely be considered “genre television”… a mantra that
they still follow to this day. (Case in point: following tonight’s episode, HBO
debuted The Newsroom, the new series
from Emmy-/Oscar-winning writer Aaron Sorkin. HBO loves its awards ringers!) And
so, HBO spent nearly a decade avoiding the genre waters… until True Blood, that is.
True Blood tore
onto the HBO stage in September 2008, guided by creator Alan Ball, who had
previously gained a lot of clout at the network by masterminding one of their
signature prestige series, Six Feet Under. (Prior to that, Ball had won an Oscar for
writing 1999’s Best Picture winner, American
Beauty.) Certainly, you’d think that
HBO would have been above making a series about vampires… but Ball’s clout,
combined with the network’s ability to allow gratuitous vampire gore and sex,
seemed unbeatable. The timing worked
wonders, as True Blood’s first season
dovetailed with the release of the first Twilight
film, helping to create an insatiable pop culture craving for vampires. As a result, True Blood became a breakout hit, which the network
oh-so-desperately needed in the aftermath of The Sopranos’ final
season.
Flash-forward to the present-day, where True Blood has entered its fifth season... and fatigue has set in. Season
4 was not well-received at all, thanks to numerous ineffective plot lines
(Arlene’s potentially evil baby! Jason Stackhouse, werepanther breeder! Any
plotline involving the werewolf pack!) and, in Marnie, a main villain who just couldn’t
hold a candle to the grandiose personality that was Season 3’s Russell Edgington. From a popularity perspective, True Blood has also faded: AMC’s The Walking Dead managed to build onto
its already-staggering success in its second season, officially ensuring that
zombies have replaced vampires as television’s favorite undead creature. Heck,
even True Blood’s status as HBO’s
genre jewel has fallen considerably, thanks to the ecstatic critical and
audience response to Game of Thrones. Finally, there was the news that Alan Ball
would step down as showrunner of True Blood
after Season 5 in order to work on a new series for HBO’s little brother,
Cinemax. Certainly, all was not well in
Bon Temps.
So, now that we’re officially 25% into the new season, what
do we know? Well, as any True Blood fan will attest to, each
season is a slow build, taking 4 to 6 episodes in order to truly get into a narrative
groove. And even in tonight’s episode,
the show’s still moving all of its chess pieces into place… but there’s bits
and pieces that indicate that we’ve got some meaty potential for the rest of
the year. But we’ll get to that. :-)
Let’s start where the episode began, with Vampire Tara
becoming accustomed to her new vampire super-skills, before stumbling across a
stranded motorist who’s changing her tire.
It only takes a few seconds before Tara cracks out her fangs and holds
her down to suck her blood… but then, Tara wises up and says “I’m sorry” (her
second line of dialogue so far this season), before zooming off. Tara then makes her way to Merlotte’s, and
encounters Sam, who serves her at least a dozen bottles of True Blood. Tara makes Sam promise that he won’t contact
Sookie or Lafayette as to her whereabouts… which leads to an awkward scene the
next morning where Sam tries – and fails miserably - to hide his knowledge of Tara
from Sookie’s mind powers. (“Boobs boobs boobs…”) Turns out, Tara’s spending
the day in the walk-in cooler… which
almost works, until Tara, woken up by Lafayette, emerges from the cooler in
front of the entire Merlotte’s staff, all vampired out and positively ticked-off. She then races off into town, and as the
episode ends, Tara enters a tanning bed and decides to toast herself to the
True Death. Pam senses Tara’s screams
from within her Fangtasia office, and simply responds, “You stupid bitch,” as
we cut to black.
At this point, the best thing that I can say about the
Vampire Tara plot is that it’s a sizable – and wonderfully welcome - change of
pace from all the other Tara plots we’ve had to endure thus far in the series. Let’s face it: Weren’t you getting sick of
the whole “Tara unwittingly stumbles into the big bad villain’s evil plan” plot
that dragged down Seasons 2 & 4? This is why I was so excited at the end of
Season 4, when Tara was knocking on death’s door… and which I was a little bit
disappointed that Ball and his writing staff decided not to actually kill her
off in the Season 5 premiere. (That’s
one of the problems with a show like True
Blood: Given the variety of supernatural elements in play, no character
ever really dies, which diffuses a lot of dramatic tension. See also Heroes, which took this rule to
extremes.) As long as Tara’s vampire
growing pains remain the focus of this season, I think things will work out
okay… but again, it’s still too early in the season to say.
As for Tara’s reluctant maker, Pam, she had some nice
moments, beginning with the fun scenes of her speed-texting and
speed-calculating at Fangtasia, further solidifying her position as the show’s
best comic relief. (Unfortunately, we
didn’t get any further scenes of Wal-Mart Sweatsuit Pam, but we can’t win ‘em
all.) In addition, we also got a
continuation of last week’s 1905 flashbacks, where Eric stops by Pam’s
whorehouse, and makes it very clear that he’s interested in Pam, and not any of
her “merchandise”. After a brief run-in
between Eric and Bill (with a special guest appearance by Lorena!), Eric and
Pam head to bed, where Pam begs Eric to turn her into a vampire. Eric is reluctant, mentioning that he doesn’t
want to take on the responsibilities of being a maker, but Pam forces Eric’s
hand by slitting her wrists and bleeding nearly to death. Whereas last week’s flashback didn’t serve
much purpose, this week’s events make things quite clearer, in an effort to set
up parallels between Pam as maker and as make.
It’s another indication toward the long-term payoff of the season-long plot
structure… and why it can occasionally be hard to judge pieces of a True Blood episode on their own, without
being able to see the larger picture.
(Case in point: the abrupt scene where Terry tells Arlene that he and
his war buddy Patrick are taking off immediately for Who Knows Where.)
A loose story thread from last season comes back in full
force this episode, with Debbie’s parents coming to town to try and find their missing
daughter… whom, as you know, had her head blown off by Sookie in the final
minutes of last season’s finale. There’s
a fair amount of dilly-dallying and obscuring the truth… but it pays off near
the end when Sookie reveals all to Alcide.
As you can imagine, Alcide doesn’t respond well… but we’ll have to wait
until next week to really get into the fallout from that revelation.
Now, onto the sexcapades of the Bon Temps Sheriff’s
Department, with Andy’s bare-bottom photo from the season premiere making its
way to Facebook… and which Andy, in all of his inexplicable charm, manages to twist
into a positive, as he uses it to segue into asking Holly to go steady with
him. The whole “I’m a witch”/”I’m an
alcoholic/V addict” back-and-forth was sweetly amusing in its own right… and it
certainly helped distract from Jason Stackhouse’s latest dilemma, as he
contemplated how he had been taught all his life to fill all his emotional
holes with sex. And when I say “taught”,
I mean that he boinked his old teacher, whom he encountered tonight during a
critical pickle-purchasing mission at the supermarket… and whom eventually got
to see Jason’s pickle, ifyouknowwhatImean. (His teacher, Miss Steeler, was
played by Melinda Page Hamilton, who TV fans will recognize as Anna Draper from
Mad Men.) Who knows if Jason’s newfound self-realization
will make an impact on the rest of the season… personally, I give it no more
than two episodes before he’s back in the swing of things. ;-)
Finally, there’s the continuation of Bill and Eric’s
plotline, as they desperately try to convince the Authority to spare their
lives in exchange for handing over Russell Edgington, whom we briefly saw at
the end of last week’s episode recuperating from his one-year stay in a cement
grave. (In case you’re wondering why we’ve
barely seen Russell to this point, it’s because the start of True Blood filming overlapped with the
end of filming for Denis O’Hare’s other series, FX’s American Horror Story.) Ever
on the cusp of vampire technology, the Authority outfits Bill and Eric’s chests
with cross-shaped devices called iStakes, which serve not only as tracking
devices, but also as actual stakes should the two mess up or act against the
Authority’s wishes. (I do not see an iStake app in the iTunes store… yet. Don’t let me down, HBO… or True Blood super-fans!) It also serves
as an obligatory moment to get Bill and Eric’s shirts off… but let’s be honest:
there are certain quotas that this show needs to meet. ;-) Later on, both Bill and Eric get one-on-one
moments with Salome, who seduces both of them for the purposes of, shall we
say, a more intimate form of interrogation than what we saw last week. Fortunately, both of our guys come up clean… while
Nora cracks in the interrogation room, receiving a nice hot dose of silver.
We’ve yet to get any significant time with Christopher
Meloni’s big bad, Roman, but so far, he's been spouting a lot about the “mainstreaming” of vampires:
trying to counteract the public’s negative perception of vampires, which has
been fueled primarily by moments such as Russell’s epic on-air spine-ripping from
Season 3. Now, at first, working Russell back
into the True Blood proceedings seems like a desperate act by a long-in-the-tooth series…
but at least they’re setting things up in the right way by creating opposition
to Russell from within the vampire community.
One of the angles I’ve always enjoyed about True Blood is the whole aspect of how vampires have been
incorporated into the show’s fictional society, and humans' reaction to it. It's led to some fun, entertaining, and insightful angles
(such as Season 2’s trip to the Fellowship of the Sun). If the show can milk this aspect for all its
worth, while at the same time re-introducing the show’s greatest villain into
the mix, we could have a great season… but we’ve got a ways to go before we reach that level. And since we only have nine weeks left, I certainly hope the show gets there soon.
Other notes:
- The rebooting of Rev. Steve Newlin continues to have potential, especially in his new position as “the new Nan Flanagan”. Certainly we’ll get the opportunity to see more of the public reaction to his about-face, like what we saw last week when Sookie went to the stake shop.
- So, umm, Hoyt at Fangtasia… that was unexpected. I’m still trying to process that particular image.
- “You guys are too cute to be goo!”
- Enjoy tonight’s brief scenes of Anna Paquin in her Merlotte’s outfit: Paquin was pregnant during the filming of this season, so expect a fair amount of TV trickery later this season to obscure her baby bump (as the show will not write her pregnancy into the story).
- Lafayette only uses the finest bleach in his gumbo. Mmm-mmmmm….
- That was Tina Majorino (Deb from Napoleon Dynamite, and also from Waterworld) as the Authority's version of Q.
- Crunchy or sweet? America needs to know.
- Coming Wednesday: We join the new season of Futurama, already in progress.
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