As anyone who reads my posts on Idol Chatter knows, I’m a huge vampire fan (gigantic even!). That’s why I post so much about Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight Series” and the forthcoming Twilight movie (this Friday! I’m counting down…), and that’s also why I’ve been watching, ever so faithfully, HBO’s new series “True Blood,” which has its first season finale next Sunday.
I liked “True Blood” a lot–at first. But as with all HBO series–be it “Big Love” or “The Sopranos“–“True Blood” has taken a dive into some serious depravity. The show’s themes are becoming so depraved that I don’t know if I can bear to keep watching. But unlike “Big Love” and “The Sopranos,” which took several seasons to get fully out of hand, fully dark, and fully disturbing, “True Blood” has managed this arc in a mere 12 episodes.

“True Blood” started out with old-fashioned courtship between Sookie (played by Anna Paquin) and Vampire Bill–a sweet take off on the old-fashioned courtship we see with Bella and Edward in “Twilight.” There was also a murder-mystery associated with “True Blood,” which at first was rather peripheral because the focus was on Sookie and Bill’s human-vampire relationship. But as the show has progressed, the murders are piling up, they are all women, and they all involve sex crimes (except in the case of Sookie’s grandmother). Meanwhile, the sweet romantic courtship between Sookie and Bill has been sidelined for extremely kinky vampire-human sex and drugs-and-sex storylines. I was turned off long ago by that stuff–it’s out of control and not to my taste.
The religious-themed storylines, on the other hand, have become more interesting, but they too are bordering on the depraved at this point. Across several shows there was a focus on exorcisms–two characters (mother and daughter) endure graphic, disturbing exorcisms and are at once “cured” of their “demons” and saved by Jesus. The born again bit only had staying power with the mother, though, and now we have Mom playing tough-love with daughter Tara in order to bring her back to Jesus and be saved again. Of course, now it looks like Tara is about to become a prostitute–which frankly, I am not interested in watching. It’s simply too painful.
See what I mean about depravity?
Between the kinky sex, the kinky religion, the kinky drug-trips, and the kinky murders, the romance between Sookie and Bill seems a thing long-past. I’ll watch the season finale, but I’m guessing it’s only going to get more disturbing. So despite my love of all-things vampire, I think that “True Blood” takes things too far into the darkness and the disturbing for my taste.
What about you? Do you like “True Blood”? Or has this new HBO series veered away from all the reasons why you read vampire novels or watch vampire TV shows, too?