AT FIRST GLANCE Merlotte’s looks like your typical suburban watering hole – waitresses walk around in skin-tight white t-shirts that emphasize their breasts, micro-mini shorts that emphasize butts and bare legs. It’s all a guy could ask for after a hard day’s work. Except that this bar is in Bon Temps, Louisiana, in the middle of a forest and the main character, Sookie (Anna Paquin, of The Piano and the X-Men trilogy) can hear the thoughts of all the patrons. Add to this, vampires have come out of their coffins a scant two years ago and walk around like the rest of us.
True Blood, the newest HBO television series, is based on Charlaine Harris’s best-selling novels, Dead Until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas, from a popular series known as the Southern Vampire Mysteries. Alan Ball is writer, creator and executive producer of the HBO series. Like the funeral parlour in Ball’s series Six Feet Under, and the bland suburb in his superbly-written film American Beauty, a prosaic setting is injected with psychological complexity.
Sookie wishes she didn’t have to listen to everyone’s lascivious thoughts while she serves beer. Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) desperately wants to get close to Sookie, but can’t get up the nerve to express his true feelings. Tara (Rutina Wesley) is the town misfit who expresses her mind and, as a result, can’t hold down a job in the local Wal-Mart while she reads Shock Doctrine.
What unbalances everything is the appearance of a vampire in the bar one night. Bill (Stephen Moyer) asks for Tru:Blood, the Japanese-manufactured synthetic blood, but the bar doesn’t carry it. Never had a need to, until that night. Sookie is enthralled, particularly when she realizes that in his presence, the thoughts she can normally read are stilled. Blissful silence at last.
She saves him from the clutches of the town’s local drug dealers, who also deal in vampire blood, ‘V’, an aphrodisiac that gives Sookie’s brother a severe case of priapism (a persistent erection). And so begins an unlikely relationship between vampire and mortal, in the context of vampire rights, fang-bangers (mortals who crave sex with vampires) and Sookie’s grandmother, who wants Bill to relate his Civil War experiences to the local historical society.
It’s difficult to see with the benefit of only a few episodes just where Mr. Ball wants to take us. Given past HBO series, however, the audience has to be patient as the characters deepen and the metaphors being explored become hooked to everyday experience. We are exposed to the revelation of Sookie’s powers, and how she has had to live with them all her life. And Bill’s age, and how vampires like to live in nests and frequent their own bars, one in particular called ‘Fangtasia’. And the problems with Sookie’s brother, Jason (Ryan Kwantin), who always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a woman is murdered and has fang marks on her inner thigh.
Set me up with a B negative. This could be a long night.
Sundays at 9 pm, The Movie Network.
