Review: True Blood 1×01-1×04

After reading and reviewing Dead Until Dark last week, I couldn’t wait to spend some time with HBO’s True Blood. Over the weekend, I had time to do just that, and I must say I’m extremely impressed.

The TV show, under the capable leadership of Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), manages to hold true to its source material while making it palatable to HBO’s viewership. With some minor exceptions, the show’s plot follows beat-for-beat the plot of Charlaine Harris’s work. Alan Ball has chosen to write a new character into the story, Sookie’s hot-headed African-American best friend Tara. Her character is so well-written and richly developed that she fits right in with the rest of the colorful cast. Since she’s black, Tara also brings the issue of race, dealt with in the book only obliquely, to the forefront.

The show succeeds because it plays so well on the strengths of Harris’s novel. The social and cultural implications of vampires living in our midst never cease to intrigue. Normally, I find that characters are more three-dimensional on the page than on the screen, but in the case of True Blood I actually find the opposite to be true. Sookie’s brother Jason, for example, who is implicated in several grizzly murders, gets much more time front-and-center than he does in the novel. For the most part, the new situations developed for these characters feel as though they’re in keeping with Charlaine Harris’s original conceptions.

The highlight performance here is Anna Paquin’s portrayal of protagonist Sookie Stackhouse. Hers is an incredibly complex character, and Paquin transitions easily between her fiery spunk and her emotional vulnerability. Sookies mind-reading ability is also handled fairly well.

The vampires themselves are downright creepy. This show certainly wouldn’t fly on a primetime network; there’s far too much profanity, sex, and violence, and all these things are critical to the story.

I think there are eight more episodes to go this season, and the show has already been given the go-ahead for a second run. If it maintains its momentum, True Blood will be yet another jewel in HBO’s already-encrusted original series crown.