Horrible News!

I’m going to be ill:

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/05/new-buffy-movie.html

Why, Hollwood, why?! Why must people try and destroy all the awesome stuff from my childhood?! First, it was The Omen remake, then the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, and now this? Why don’t people have original ideas anymore?

From Buffy to True Blood: My Newest Vampire Addiction

Commentary

It was 1997 when Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the (now defunct) WB network. It was a midseason replacement for a short-lived show called Savannah, it was based off the critically panned film of the same name by writer Joss Whedon, and I was a vampire crazed 9 year old that loved the original movie (it was funny, sue me!). So naturally, I gravitated towards this show. Buffy’s first season was relatively short for network TV (it only got 12 episodes), but it was also unlike anything on air at the time in other ways.

For starters, it was a serialized show in a landscape where thirty minute comedies were the norm. Then, it didn’t exactly have a specific genre – it was a nice mix of fantasy, horror, comedy, drama and action adventure. Add on top of that that it was also a coming of age story about a young girl who has a destiny to rid the world of evil while struggling to just be a normal person, and you had this really odd, sometimes campy, freakshow. But it worked and over the course of 7 seasons became a cult hit.

Buffy was special to me in many ways. Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy was incredibly likeable, adorably cute, yet someone you could believe wouldn’t be pushed around and could save the world. Not an easy feat for a then teenage actress to pull off. Then, there was the zany group of sidekicks that I wound up loving more than Buffy herself, and one in particular that made puberty much easier to get through. David Boreanaz’s Angel, Buffy’s beau for the first three seasons of the series, was walking sex as a 240 year old vampire with a soul and a slight Jekyll/Hyde problem that made fornication between the two potentially life threatening for the residents of fictional Sunnydale, California. He went on to get his own spin-off series on the WB during Buffy’s fourth season and I followed every moment of its five year run.

Once Angel went off the air in 2003 (Buffy’s final season aired the year prior), I was devasted. Where was I going to get my weekly vampire fix? How was I going to cope with the loss of a group of characters I’d come to love like members of my own family for close to 8 years?! I grew up with these shows. These shows taught me very valuable life lessons that I’d never get from some procedural on NBC or a thirty minute sitcom (i.e. don’t have sex with your boyfriend or all hell will break loose, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, magic is crack, etc.) – how was I going to live?!

Well, many TV stations heard the cries of us Buffy fanatics and decided to try and get in on the vampire hysteria to embarrassing ends. First, there was that show on Lifetime based off of some author’s vampire series. The show was so bad, I can’t even be bothered to go look up what it was called or who wrote the books. Seriously – why should I waste my valuable time reliving that travesty?! It failed for many reasons, one of them being that it was on the network for women. Really, folks? You put a vampire show on the same channel that gives you such cinematic greatness as My Husband, the Rapist, I Shot My Husband Dead After He Beat Me, Pregnant and Homeless, and The Burning Bed and expected people to watch it? Okay. Add to the fact that it was shot like some bad film school project and I’m not surprised it got the ax.

Then there was Moonlight. I watched one episode of that godawful show and was ready to gauge my eyes out. Here was the premise: a vampire works as a police officer (at night) solving crimes while looking hot. Hmmm…where have I heard that idea before? Oh right – Angel, Buffy’s spin-off! Sure, Angel was a detective (at night) who was esentially fighting an evil law firm to stop an apocalypse (trust me, it’s not as dumb as it sounds when I recap it) so that’s different. But still – copy much? And okay, to be fair, Angel wasn’t the first vampire detective on television either. There was the incredibly awesome Canadian show Forever Knight that used to air on Sci-Fi about a  400 year old vampire detective Nick Knight who was trying to find a cure for vampirism while fighting crime. Long story short, those two shows (Angel and FK) were different and had excellent writing. Moonlight was a poor man’s version of both and thankfully, it bit the dust after a season and a half.

So when news of True Blood started circulating two years ago, I inwardly groaned. I was so spoiled by Buffy and Angel that I couldn’t imagine anything coming along that would live up them. Then I saw the pilot of TB and groaned out loud (as did my horrified mother who was appalled at all the sex – she’s over it now, though, and can watch in peace): it was boring. For all the talk that Buffy fans do about how boring the pilot of that show, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” was or how they couldn’t wait for Angel’s “City Of…” pilot to be over, this was the worst pilot of a vampire show I’d ever seen. Seemingly gratuitous sex scene after sex scene plagued my vision, the characters were either shrill (i.e. Tara) or just plain snoozeworthy (i.e. Sookie, Bill, and Sam), and I couldn’t believe this was an Alan Ball show, particularly because I loved Six Feet Under and his film American Beauty.

Luckily for HBO, this show came on at a time where Desperate Housewives was on hiatus so I had no choice but to keep tuning in. What the hell else was I going to watch? The second episode wasn’t that much better than the first, but the third one was where I said, “Wow – this is actually good!” I’ve been watching like a fiend ever since.

Like Buffy, the secondary characters in True Blood are way more interesting than the lead. Tara Thornton, Sookie’s best friend, is probably the most kickass character in the whole bunch. She went from being super annoying angry black chick stereotype to a full, fleshed out, heartbreaking person. Tara has an epically crap life (her mom’s an alcoholic who’s convinced she’s possessed by a demon, her father is MIA, etc.) and I just want to simultaneously reach through the TV and give the girl a hug and slap some sense into her. In fact, she reminds me of my favorite Buffyverse character Cordelia Chase (played excellently by Charisma Carpenter) in that she’s so funny, so snarky, a little mean, but has a heart of gold.

Then there’s my other favorite TB character, Lafayette. This guy could’ve also come off as another campy stereotype, but because of the wonderful acting of Nelsan Ellis, he’s one of the most compelling people in the series. Lafayette is an openly gay black man who paints his toenails, wears eyeshadow and lipstick regularly to work, prostitutes on the side for Bon Temps, LA politicians and sells V, illegal vampire blood that humans use to get high and horny. He’s usually laugh out loud hysterical, but then will occasionally say or do something incredibly scary reminding the townspeople (and us viewers) that even though he’s gay and flamboyant, he’s still a man and will still whoop some ass if you cross him.

My only issue with this show is the relationship between Bill and Sookie. So Bill Compton is a vampire and Sookie Stackhouse is a 26 year old virgin who’s taken by Bill’s “otherness” so to speak. With the exception of the really hot deflowering scene they had together, I don’t get a romantic vibe from these two. Now, maybe it’s just because I’m biased due to my hardcore Buffy/Angel love (they were the cutest TV couple ever in my opinion), but Bill and Sookie just don’t seem like star-crossed lovers to me and that’s a problem when that’s what the show is trying to sell me. Sometimes they seem more like brother and sister. Despite this minor problem, this show actually shaped up to be *gulp* better than Buffy or Angel’s first seasons.

And now I have to go flog myself for committing the cardinal sin of saying something was better than the two best shows ever on television.

My TB love was almost ruined, however, when I went back to read the first two books of the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. They are just not good. I mean, for what they are (popcorny entertainment), they’re acceptable. But they definitely don’t hold a candle to Anne Rice’s novels, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, or Bram Stocker’s Dracula. And Sookie and Bill are a thousand times more annoying in the books. He’s insanely possessive, getting angry if she even dares to speak to another man in his presence and she’s a total pushover, changing her style of dress when he tells her to and other ridiculous things like that. Combine that with my hardcore hate of anything remotely Twilight-ish and Mary Sue type characters, Harris’s books make me angry as something of a feminist and makes me question teenage girls’s tastes. Do you ladies really want insane, stalkery, uber-possessive nutcase boyfriends like Bill and Edward Cullen? If book sales for both series are any indication, the horrifying answer to that is “yes.”

Still, True Blood is great TVand I hope it gets many more seasons.

True Blood: Television with Bite

Feature

HBO’s hit vampire series, True Blood, returns June 14 with more blood, fangs, and sex for its highly anticipated second season.

The show, based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries written by Charlaine Harris, was adapted by American Beauty writer Alan Ball and stays close to Ms. Harris’s original works.

Season 1 took place in the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana and introduced viewers to Sookie (played by Oscar winner and X-Men star Anna Paquin), a barmaid at Merlotte’s with telepathy and a rabid fascination with the undead. She meets and forms a relationship with Bill Compton (played by actor Stephen Moyer), a Civil War-era vampire whose mind is the only one in Bon Temps she can’t read.

“Sookie’s had a really rough time in her own personal life,” Paquin said to Hamptons Magazine. “Everyone thinks she’s a big freak. Then this dark and mysterious creature shows up, and he’s not judging her and she’s in no position to judge him. It’s the first time that she gets to be herself, and he’s fascinated by all the things that make her different. And vice versa.”

Fans of Harris’s novels were pleased to find that Season 1’s main plot was taken almost verbatim from Dead Until Dark (2001), the first installment in the Sookie Stackhouse books. However, Ball made the show an ensemble piece, giving more screen time to secondary characters Jason Stackhouse, Sookie’s dimwitted brother, (played by Ryan Kwanten); Tara Thornton, her best friend, (Rutina Wesley); Sam Merlotte, the secretive owner of the bar Sookie works in, (Sam Trammell); and Lafayette Reynolds, Tara’s cousin and Bon Temps’ only openly gay prostitute, (Nelsan Ellis), instead of leaning heavily on the Bill/Sookie pairing like Dark.

“Looking at the season as a whole, and at translating the book series to the screen, I am one happy viewer,” a poster by the name of random said at the Television Without Pity Forums. “The novels are a rocking good yarn, with a wonderful sense of comedy and colliding absurdities, and a rich and slightly insane imaginary world that upends expectations and assupmtions. The series captured all of that in spades, and enriched an already good story with surprising (or, given the author, not surprising) psychological depth. It was a great ride – in places hysterically funny, in places poetic, and even moving and sad. As a whole, I think it was a great iteration of the gothic story as seen through a postmodern and, frankly, smartass lens. At the same time, the show also has a huge, unironic heart – it is not afraid to love its characters and make it possible for us to love them too. I really dug this quality in Buffy and I dig it here very, very much. I agree with the folks who said that inventing the series’ own stories on top of the books added to the show immensely. I loved where they took Moron Jason. I loved the complexity of Tara, and how she unfolded Sam like some kind of narrative origami.” (Read full quote here)

Season 2 continues that practice, picking up where last season’s cliffhanger finale left off. Sookie and Tara find a dead man in the parking lot of Merlotte’s. Is it Lafayette? Someone else? Ball wouldn’t deny or confirm who the body was (though Lafayette did meet his demise in the first book), but did drop hints of what fans can expect from the second season:

“Jason goes into the Fellowship of the Sun church in a big way and is surprised by what he finds there,” Ball said. “There’s a new creature in town that is unlike any other. Nobody knows what this creature is, I’m not sure if it will be entirely explained in the show — it’s not a werewolf. There are new romances for Tara, Jason and Sara. Bill and Sookie have a lot of issues to sort out — including having made a new teenage vampire that’s living in their house. Bill and Sookie also go to Dallas to find one of their own who has gone missing.”  (Read full quote here)

Readers who love Harris’s second novel, Living Dead in Dallas (2002), are excited to see how much of the source material makes it to the screen.

“I watched the first season of True Blood. Although I really, really liked it and thought that it was a fairly faithful adaptation of Charlaine’s books, I thought that a lot of the humor and satire was missing from the television show,” Anne, a poster from EW.com said. “I love the books because they are so tongue in cheek and witty. I just wish that I could say the same about the TV show. Hopefully, next season will balance the humor with the chills and romance. I can’t wait for Eric, Alcide, Quinn and the rest of Sookie’s suitors to step up to the plate.” (Read full quote here)

True Blood isn’t Ball’s first foray into television. His long running original series, Six Feet Under, garnered excellent ratings for HBO and critical acclaim. And while the show, like Blood, focused on death, Ball claims the two are worlds apart in their treatment of the subject.

“It’s [True Blood] fun,” Ball said.  “I don’t know if it’s because the fantastic nature of the premise allows me enough of a remove so that it’s not so upsetting because it’s like popcorn TV, it’s like an amusement park ride for me. Six Feet Under was all about repression and this seems to me to be something that’s about abandon and it’s just been — it’s — I find the show really entertaining to produce and to be a part of making. And just because it’s so — it’s escapist. It’s totally escapist and that’s — for me, that’s one of the joys of it.”  (Read full quote here)

Harris is pleased with the way HBO has treated her creation.

“I feel totally cool, and I have succeeded in impressing my children and their friends, which is no small accomplishment,” Harris said (Read full quote here) “The storytelling in the show is different, which Alan had told me to expect. I think the series remains true to the theme of the books, and true to the spirit – that combination of humor, horror, and sex which characterizes the Sookie books.”

Sources and suggested further readings:

http://true-blood.net/?cat=21#

http://truebloodwiki.hbo.com/?t=anon

http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/index.html

http://www.trueblood-online.com/

http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showforum=1110