True Blood, a.k.a. The Sex & Vampires Show, or, Why Sex Scenes Bore Me

I watched season 1 of True Blood yesterday and found it engrossing, entertaining, mordant, frothy, sly and lightweight. I enjoy the twitchy, brave, perky performance by Anna Paquin as Sookie and the dry, subdued performance by Stephen Moyer as Bill Compton. I especially appreciate his concentrated stillness and the way in which he projects an absence of movement appropriate to a non-living creature. He makes a wonderful foil for Sookie, instilled by Paquin with an almost fidgety sense of movement, brightness and sensitivity. Even though I have the most investment in Sookie and Bill, I'm curious about the rest of the characters and will probably follow their storylines whenever I get the chance to watch season 2 in one fell swoop.

That being said, the unrelenting amount of sex had me bouncing forward until such scenes were over. Every time anyone had sex, which was frequently, the story's forward momentum halted to linger on the characters flailing away. Then I had an epiphany about the reason that almost all sex scenes in modern media are so incredibly dull. ( Here's why. )

Vampire hierarchies in TV shows, with a close look at True Blood

I've always thought that, if there were any more than, say, 10 vampires in the world, that they would form some sort of para-society, parasitic to, but somewhat independent of, human society. Vamp society, in my mind, would include an organization of power and some set of rules. Let's look at some vamp societies in recent TV shows: ( Read more... )