Time for a third-episode verdict on HBO’s True Blood, which has already been picked up for a second series. Three episodes in and, thankfully, we’ve transcended the teen girl fantasy supernatural source material that characterised the first episode and moved on to more interesting, darker pastures.
The show is now an interesting take on prejudice. Rather than a simple slating of intolerance, the show questions how tolerant the tolerant really are. Would you be so quick to defend vampires from stereotyping and violence if you knew they fed on babies, for instance?
The show still suffers from its virginal heroine’s tedious innocence – right down to dressing in white for every occasion – and the way Southeners are almost universally portrayed as stupid, intolerant and sex-crazed. Stephen Noyer’s brooding vampire Bill is so repressed he’s downright dull.
But it’s actually pretty creepy, can be quite humorous, is surprisingly sexually explicit and deals with some quite dark subject matter.
So The Medium is Not Enough has great pleasure in declaring True Blood a two or ‘Partial Caruso’ on The Carusometer quality scale.
PS If you want a longer, more in-depth review of True Blood, I’ll be looking at it in the October issue of Action Network magazine
