Pilot Review: True Blood (HBO)


Alan Ball is at home again and he brought us an unusual pilot about vampires in Louisiana. However, no matter how unusual the pilot is, it contains some pretty ordinary mistakes, which make Alan and HBO look pretty bad. As always, don't be a fool to keep reading if you haven't seen the episode yourself, or you will be spoiled.

What's it about?
The series follows Sookie Stackhouse, a barmaid living in Louisiana who can read people's minds. Her life is turned upside down when the vampire Bill walks into her place of employment two years after vampires 'came out of the coffin' on national television.

What's good?
The show has a very interesting concept, which I've never seen on television before. Vampires and humans living together, but also not living together. There's still fear and insecurity on both sides and that's what makes True Blood really interesting for me. The social aspect of the whole thing is just really engaging. Will the vampires ever be able to live a normal life among us humans?

Also the song in the opening credits (which are supposed to change when the show airs in September) was great. I hope they keep it, because I need time to find out what it is.

Other than that I can only say that Stephen Moyer really impressed me. I knew him from various projects, but I never gave him the attention he deserves. His performance as the vampire Bill is one of the few things that will make me give the show a second chance, despite of all its flaws.

What's bad?
I don't see a story here. Sure. It's about vampires and humans living together. But then there's nothing. It's supposed to be about Sookie, but she just meets the vampire and gets beat up by some random couple who try to drain Bill's blood. Oooookay. And now? I really don't know where they're going with this.

Besides, the main character Sookie is just a pain in the ass. Everybody says what a great actress Anna Paquin is, but I don't see that. I'm sorry. She's run-of-the-mill (like most of the actors, unfortunately) and that's annoys me. HBO can do better.

I'm not gonna talk about the vampires' fangs. You can see how ridiculous they look in the picture above. What I'm gonna talk about is how trashy the pilot is. Every five minutes I had to check what exactly I'm watching, because I could not believe that something like that will be airing on HBO. It could as well have been a ABC or NBC show. It just has not the pay TV feel to it like Six Feet Under or Carnivàle did. I realize that the network has to be a little bit more mainstream to attract more subscribers, but that's not how I want to see that happening.

The only thing that reminds me of the fact that I'm watching a pay TV show here are the sex scenes, which are unfortunately more distracting than they're supporting the story. I'm a big fan of sex on television. I think it can help the show to tell whatever it wants to tell, but what they do on True Blood is to throw in a couple of sexual encounters (including a ridiculous sex tape with a vampire banging the crap out of some chick, which is probably one of the trashiest moments of television I have ever seen) and hope that the audience will like it. Sure, we got some nice eye candy, but that's about it. Boring.

The last thing that really annoys me about the pilot (I'm not gonna mention the minor issues) is Sookie's mind reading. There's just no way of understanding what the people that are read are saying. I tried adjusting the equalizer and all that technical blah blah, but it didn't help. I hope they're gonna change that for the final version, because I'd really like to know what those people are thinking. I consider myself quite fluent in English and I do understand almost everything when I watch a show, but the mind reading is just impossible. Help please.

What's the bottom line?
The show's concept bears so much potential, it's almost impossible to imagine that anyone could screw it up as much as Alan Ball did. I love the man for his work on Six Feet Under and American Beauty, but if that's the best he can do nowadays he should probably just stop writing. I'm obviously disappointed. However, I'm not giving up on True Blood, because I just know that it can do so much better if somebody would give the writers a kick in the ass to wake them up and point them in the right direction.