TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I got caught up in the TrueBlood ad-campaign in New York City this summer. The posters for the show were actually posters for the central-to-the-plot Tru:Blood drink, goofing on energy-drink advertisements. The idea is that this synthetic blood serves all the vampire’s nutritional needs which means they no longer need to kill people.

Preceding the pilot, HBO ran two half-hour documentaries about the evolution of the vampire. The first half hour dealt with the evolution of the vampire in legend — going back through the origins of the creature throughout history and pointing how old the idea of a vampire actually is. The second deals with the evolution of the vampire in pop-culture and literature — pretty much starting with the original Dracula book and ending up through pretty current stuff. They made stops at Bela Lugosi’s civilized Dracula. The evolution to Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins who was the first vampire who was horrified by what he was and what he was doing. The evolution of the Dracula character to Christopher Lee’s horrifically evil version. They spent some time on Blade, The Lost Boys, Underworld, and the Anne Rice universe. Notable exception was any mention of the Whendonverse — which seems like a very strange call considering the fan base of the two shows is essentially the same. Non-notable exception was the lack of mention of Moonlight.

I was also happy to see HBO got the bat-shit crazy psychic vampire lady to appear and talk about how she has to eat other people’s energy to stay feeling well. Seriously. I’m not kidding. She wrote a book about it.

I presume they ignored the Whedon vampires for two reasons. First, the pilot episode is ridiculously close in plotline to the Buffy pilot. Blonde girl with special powers runs into a vampire and falls in love with him. He sets her life on a new course. Secondly, the Whedonverse ruins their idea that this show is a natural progression of how the vampires have kind of moved from evil to romantic to heroic over the course of the last few decades. Whedon’s vampires were unapologeticly evil. They killed without thought. In this incarnation, vampires are just like people. They no longer have to kill people because of Tru:Blood so they “come out of the coffin” and present themselves to society. The opening scene shows a “vampire rights advocate” on Politically Correct arguing for vampire rights.

The Good

• Best line: Would you be willing to give up all different flavors of food and only drink Slim-Fast the rest of your life?
• Anna Paquin as a blonde. I think I like it.

The Bad

• As a Buffy fan, the way vampires on this show “vamp out” is really lame — and the actor they used to show it off in the opening scene didn’t help. The first scene in Buffy was Julie Benz dressed up in a school-girl outfit flirting with a guy and bringing him on to the roof of Sunnydale High. When she turns, her whole face turns monstrous and she kills him rather violently. It’s a scene that sticks with you. On this show, the first image is a completely unintimidating redneck threatening two drunk high school kids and a store owner. With his not intimidating Louisiana accent, he has has two pretty fake looking fangs fall next two his front teeth and says “ah’ma eat ya”. It was not the greatest debut for the show’s vampires.
• As seems to be the problem occasionally with HBO shows, the debut episode was paced agonizingly slow. Nothing of interest really happened and it really felt like they were killing time in a lot of it — which seems like not a good idea for a pilot episode.
• If anyone else watched this, did anyone else notice that Sookie’s (yes, Anna Paquin’s name in the show is “Sookie Stackhouse”) bedroom was exactly Buffy’s bedroom — right down to the positioning of the bed, window, and wallpaper? As I watched this episode, I found the writer’s and director’s contentions that they “never watched that show” become increasingly hard to believe. Especially, as we previously mentioned, the plotline of the first episode being about a blonde with special powers falling in love with the vampire.

The Rest

I don’t quite know the rules for this world yet — which I don’t like. Silver appears to burn and paralyze them. The documentary let us know that vampires who hate God and garlic are just a stereotype. They appear to move with super speed. They may or may not be able to hypnotize people. Apparently, humans ingest vampire blood as an XTC-like drug which increases vitality and sex drive. This drug is harvested by paralyzing a vampire and draining their blood out of them — which indicates that vampires have blood in them — which is weird. Looking around the web a bit, this show is based on the “Southern Vampire Series” by Charlaine Harris. So, I guess if I cared to look for her rules I could find them… but I’m of the opinion that a vampire show needs to lay out their rules and mythology early on. I also call shenanigans on the vampire’s contention that “we don’t like our weaknesses to be made public.” Bull. We live in the Internet age. Two YEARS after the vampires were made public knowledge, the government and regular people would DEMAND to know how to kill them. As I’ve mentioned before — give me the mythology early. I want to know the rules early on.

On top of ALL that, I don’t really get it. I don’t see where they’re going yet. It doesn’t seem to be a drama, it’s not very funny, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. If I’m grading the series on the pilot alone, it gets pretty low marks. It’s unsurprising that they sent the first two episodes out for review. So, at the moment, I’m undecided. Fellow upstate boy and guy with contacts SMS told me that the 2nd episode is much better than the first. That being the case, it gets at least next week.