True Blood: Season One

Warning! The post contains spoilers, so if you haven’t watched all of season one, you may not want to continue.

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I watched the season one finale of True Blood, and about one week since I started writing this post, so it’s about time I pulled my finger out.  Before I start, I should point out that I’ve been a bit ambivalent towards the series over the opening twelve episodes, and anyone who has read my previous posts or comments, over on Unpopcult, will know that at times I’ve been outright critical of it.  When reading TV forums, I get really annoyed when people continuously slag off a programme when they could easily just stop watching;  so I apologise if this post seems hypocritical and I come across like that.  That said, I do have a reason for wanting to write this: I need to know why have I watched the whole season when I found so much to criticise about it.  I’m hoping that over the course of this post that I might find some answers.  In the likely event that I don’t find any, I’m more than happy to take your suggestions.

Before the series started, I was looking forward to it; on paper, it had a lot going for it.  It was critically acclaimed.  It was made by the peerless HBO.  The series creator, Alan Ball, had a good track record of making ‘cult’ TV (as well as winning the world cup). It was about vampires integrating in to human society, which is a concept that certainly intrigued me.  What could go wrong?

I enjoyed the first couple of episodes as we slowly learned about the world and its characters. But, as we got a bit further in, two things stood out to me.  Firstly, nothing seemed to have happened; secondly, I couldn’t make my mind up whether I liked it or not.  The acting was good, the script seemed good and it looked very stylish, but there seemed to be an ingredient missing.  As the episodes went by, my misgivings seemed to grow, and yet I continued to watch.

Here are some of my thoughts gleaned from my blog and from my comments on Unpopcult.

Episode 6

I’ve been a bit undecided about True Blood thus far; there’s lots of good stuff but it feels at times as if it’s being outrageous for the sake of being ‘cool’.

This episode was great though, and, despite being low key, the funeral gave it a great focus.

I had a similar feeling when I watched the first few episodes of Six Feet Under, when it originally aired, and promptly gave up on it. I’ve stuck with True Blood a little longer, probably because I find the premise more interesting. Despite episode 6 being a good episode, I feel they really need to move the overall plot along sharpish. I have episode 7 waiting to be watched on my Sky Planner, so fingers crossed.

Episode 8

I think I’m rapidly falling in to the “don’t like it” camp. It’s one of those shows where it should be great, but it just doesn’t grip me whatsoever, and some of it is downright awful.

Episode 9

I’m rapidly losing patience with this. I’m just watching episode 9 now and I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t care about any of the characters, not a good sign.

Even though I don’t want to watch any more, I feel compelled to watch the end of the season. And then I thought about not watching season 2, but it’s supposed to be much better.. it’s the damned soap effect all over again!

Episode 10

Finally got around to watching this episode just 10 minutes before this week’s episode started – which should tell you something about my enthusiasm for it.

It wasn’t a bad episode but I still didn’t really care. I don’t care enough about Tara and her exorcism. Sookie continues to be unlikeable.  Jason and Amy feels like it’s been going on for three episodes too long, and it only started three episodes ago.

The vampire stuff was interesting this week, but if you’re going to have them be so absolutely evil then you at least need Bill to be a strong character to counter balance it. His reluctance to turn the girl was well done but I can’t help but feel that we’re ten episodes in and don’t know nearly enough about him or his motivations.

(On Bill)… I don’t know if I understand why he wants to be ‘good’ and the other vamps are all ‘evil’.

I don’t mind something being grim as long as it’s also interesting. When I said that I don’t understand Bill’s motivations I think it’s because when I think back over the ten episodes my memory suggests that Bill has only been on screen for about ten minutes.

Episode 11

This was the first week that I properly blogged about it:

This was the penultimate episode of season one, and, eleven episodes in, it remains a mystery. I still don’t know what the show is or what it is about. That said, this wasn’t a bad episode, and they finally move things forward with the whole serial killer sub-plot; sadly, this involved lots of Sookie and Sam doing boring stuff. The most interesting part of the programme is to do with the vampires, and annoyingly we only get about 30 seconds of this in the first 40 minutes and instead we get Jason and Amy (yawn). Finally, we get a scene with Bill and Jessica, the girl who he was forced to turn in to a vampire last week. This whole sequence was easily the best scene in the series so far, and provided a tantalising glimpse of what could have been. Before we know it though, we’re back to a boring Tara scene.

The episode was probably better than the last paragraph would lead you to believe, I just find the programme so frustrating. I really don’t know what to make of all the Sam and Sookie stuff, especially when Bill returned. It’s like they just did it all for a bit of soap opera style tension. And I was open-mouthed at the plot with Tara and the ’social worker’ – someone with such an obvious hidden agenda that the only way they can salvage any credibility is if they have a twist of her just being a really nice lady.

I completely missed the plot twist with the faxed photo at the end, until it was explained to me. I guess it shows how much I’ve been paying attention. I’ll try and do a season review once I’ve seen the last episode.

And so we’re finally at that season review that I promised.  Here are my thoughts on the finale:

Episode 12

(I only have my brief notes from two weeks ago, so forgive me if this isn’t very detailed.)

The Tara-Maryann subplot is bonkers.

So, Rene is the killer.  This revelation doesn’t  feel related to anything that’s happened in the last 12 weeks, so it doesn’t really mean much to me.  Everyone seems to get over the fact that they’ve had a serial killer in their midst awfully quickly.

It’s 39 minutes in before we get a glimpse of Bill, who impressively goes out in the daylight to try and save Sookie.  His attempt is futile but that only makes it  more impressive and moving.  One of the stand out scenes in the whole season.

Despite it all, I actually enjoyed the episode, even though there’s still some crap stuff like Jason’s religious conversion.

And that’s it for season one.  I had originally intended for this post to be much better written and detailed than it’s ended up being; my apathy seems incredibly fitting.  I’d be tempted to not publish it at all, but I am still semi-intrigued to see if anyone either agrees with me, or if they can come up with a theory as to why I’ve been watching.

This isn’t really even a proper season review; I’ve not said what the show is about, who the stars are, or what the characters are like.  It’s really just a list of my complaints, and I find that really bad.  What is it about this programme that fascinates me so?

One idea as to why I’ve stuck with it is my ‘Soap Effect‘, but I don’t think this would really have kicked in after so few episodes, especially as I was unconvinced about the series from the start.  It could be that I am just enjoying looking for flaws and it giving me something to talk about.  I’m sure that there is an element of that, but I don’t think I’m completely mental enough for that to be the entire story.

I watched, and was hooked by, the first season of Lost, but, when the second season was about to start, I realised that I didn’t want to watch and found the series really empty.  Maybe (hopefully), I’ll experience something similar before season 2 of True Blood hits the UK.  I have heard that the second season is much better, so I’m already scared that I’ll be watching – and complaining.  I think that ultimately I’m watching because I think that I should like it, and maybe I need to accept that I don’t like it.  What do you think?