True Blood Is the Best Vampire Show, Ever — Fight Me
In recent years, vampires have become much more than just creepy bloodsuckers in black and red capes. For example, the popular show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), with Sarah Michelle Gellar playing a chosen ‘slayer’ to defeat vampires and demons, adds teenagers being powerful against evil forces. And of course, Twilight (2008) is a love story between a vampire and a human with a little werewolf action in between. This more human aspect has made it so that we can relate more to vampires — after all, they are dead humans? But arguably, the best vampire series around is HBO’s True Blood (2008–2014). Based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries books, it has all the elements to make a binge-worthy story. What makes True Blood stand out more than any other is the complex characters, how each one embodies a sector of society. Rather than just adding a sprinkle of humanity to the vampire/supernatural world, it takes on humanity as a whole complete with divided political parties, racism, LGBTQ, religion, and even the war in Iraq.
The show’s premiere took place two months before President Obama was elected — needless to say, 2008 was a big year. True Blood’s popularity was comparable to other HBO shows like Sex and the City and the Sopranos. The allure that sets it above other vampire shows and movies is that it has everything: drama, love, sex, violence, fantasy, flashbacks, comedy, and the humanity of the vampires and their other supernatural counterparts. It’s not even that it’s held to the highest quality of vampire entertainment; it is simply one of the best shows overall of any show in history.
Set in the small fictional town of Bon Temps just miles from the actual city of Shreveport, Louisiana — a seemingly little southern town is a hotbed of action. The main character, Sookie Stackhouse, is a young, pretty waitress at the local restaurant Merlotte’s, where the whole town hangs out. She thought herself to be weird, an outcast because she could hear other people’s thoughts. Then an elusive vampire passes through the diner, and she falls in love with him. The world is full of vampires, though it still has an element of normalcy. Stackhouse finds a new sense of unique identity as she connects with vampire Bill Compton, who, like her, isn’t normal. From there, things progressively get more otherworldly.
The small-town dynamic resembles most of suburban America — conservative families and teenagers rebelling by partying and using drugs. In this town, though, the drug of choice is V, aka vampire blood which seems to have similar effects to heroin. Stackhouse’s best friend and co-worker, Tara, and her cousin Lafayette who also works at Merlotte’s, are African American. Lafayette is gay and one of the town’s V dealers. Race and sexual orientation are worth noting because it’s a source of discrimination in our country, especially in the American South. The bias of vampires is treated in the same fashion.
Throughout the show, what’s called the American Vampire League, the legal and PR representatives for all vampires in America, is shown on TV, making the case to give vampires the same rights as humans. On the other side of the spectrum, you have a group called the Fellowship of the Sun led by Christian radicals who preach against the rights of vampires. And it’s not just vampires in this show; we also become introduced to shapeshifters, werewolves, panthers, fairies, and witches. Sam Merlotte, the owner of the town’s restaurant, turns out to be a shapeshifter in which he can turn into any creature he wants, even another person.
Each sector of the supernatural seems to have its own personality. The shapeshifters are indecisive, lost, and conflicted. The wolves are a cult that fights against each other to be the leader of the pack. The panthers are similar to the wolves, but they are drug addicts and dealers, particularly V. Lafayette’s boyfriend Jesus, a witch, which hints at witchery being equivalent to witchery. And the vampires are at the top of the supernatural totem pole; after all, they can live for thousands of years.
As for the humans, many of them discriminate against all supernatural, frequently banding together against them. Although some are allies to them, this all echoed the current political landscape of divided political parties. The first African American president, Obama, had been elected, and many people on the right were outraged. In the show, a group of guys dress up in Obama masks and ride around finding supernaturals to shoot and kill. The intense hatred in the world for others that are different from them, be it race, religion, or sexual orientation, is the same as the hatred in the show for supernatural ones.
One thing that discrimination has notoriously caused throughout history is war. The war in Iraq is also a theme through Terry Bellefleur, cousin of the town’s sheriff Andy Bellefleur, who works as a cook at Merlotte’s. He has PTSD from being on the ground at war and having had to kill a woman. Before the woman died, she curses him, and now he’s haunted by a giant fire monster that wants him to die for what he’s done. Then you also have vampire Compton’s flashbacks to life as a human during the civil war. Times were divisive and violent then and still are in the modern-day. Not to mention, in the seventh and last season, vampires are dealing with a pandemic, a virus called Hepatitis V that’s killing all the vampires. Pretty ironic for our current times coping with the coronavirus pandemic.
In between all of these narratives is a whole lot of sex and action. Eric Northman, a thousand-year-old vampire, is the premier sex symbol of the show. Sookie’s brother Jason Stackhouse, having been the captain of his high school football team, an average human who starts off the show with sex addiction, eventually wants to find himself and his identity other than being a womanizer.
The centerpiece of this series is Sookie’s love for Compton and other love affairs in between. She is accepting of all humans and the supernatural, though she has her conflicts like everyone else. All in all, it’s a story about co-existence — learning how to live with creatures that are different from you — in our Earth’s society, that means accepting people that are different from us.