tvthatdoesntsuck

REVIEW FOR

TRUE BLOOD
Episode One
“Strange Love”
Written & directed by Alan Ball 

Wow, I suck.  I’ve been gone for a while, but now I’m back just in time for the new television season.  I missed the premiere of 90210, so there’s not much I can say about that, but what I can tell you about is a new show I’ve been pretty amped for.  It’s a little show called True Blood.

 True Blood seems like a match made in Heaven.  The series is based off the uber popular Stookie Stackhouse novels, written by the wonderful Charlaine Harris.  She’s been providing books upon books of hilarious, macabre, Whedon-influenced material for years now, and–judging from her smile at the premiere that would make the Joker jealous–she’s excited to see Alan Ball’s adaptation of her series.  And let’s not get me started on Alan Ball.  Not only did he write the Oscar-winning American Beauty, he also created HBO’s Six Feet Under, a series that blended the tragic with the hilarious and wrapped it up with great characters and compelling storylines.  The last Alan Ball episode I saw was “Everybody’s Waiting,” the season finale of Six Feet Under, and that was–in my humble (chuckle) opinion–one of the best episodes of television, period.  So, needless to say, True Blood had to do a lot to live up to expectations.

So here goes.

It was good.  Not fantastic, but a good start.  The episode itself was not at all self-contained, and looks like it’s just the start of what could be a season long, over arching story.  Alan Ball made a risky decision here, one that I haven’t seen made since the pilot of Firefly aired… and that is putting intense character development over story.  That’s a good thing in my opinion, but it will definitely scare off a good number of casual viewers.  There are some scenes that explode with funny lines, violence, and sexuality, but the majority of this episode moves at a very slow pace.  Ball takes full advantage of HBO’s hour-long, commercial free slot by crafting long, revealling scenes.

None the secondary cast other than Stephen Moyer (the Angel-esque vampire “Bill”) jumped out at me as particularly compelling, and the only one that really drew my interest was Anna Paquin as Stookie Stackhouse.  She was wonderful, and will be the reason I keep watching this series, aside from the fact that I trust Alan Ball to entertain.  Her performance is very layered and really gets me interested in seeing where this character is going.  I had trouble, however, with Ryan Kwanten who plays Jason Stackhouse.  I couldn’t recognize him from scene-to-scene until about forty minutes into the episode, which made for a bit of an uncomfortable feeling of “Now, who is that?” during his scenes.  In fact, I thought I was seeing multiple characters until it was later made apparent that this was one character.

Overall, it was a good watch.  Not quite up to my expectations, but it was an interesting enough start to what could eventually become a fantastic show.  I’ll definitely be watching next week.

 7/10

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