Why I Can’t Quit Watching: True Blood

True Blood premiered in a different era. It was a pre-Twilight time, when vampires weren't considered standard young adult fare– before The Vampire Diaries and The Mortal Instruments and all of their various imitators and competitors. The first season was a little uneven, especially tonally, veering between romance and horror, occasionally detouring into camp– but it was unlike almost anything else on air, then, a sexy, serious show about a spunky southern woman named Sookie Stackhouse and the vampires who were (then) inexplicably obsessed with her.

It's hard to say when, exactly, it went off the rails. For me it was the werepanthers; some people were too weirded out by the maenad subplot from season two; others couldn't handle Sookie's discovery that she's an actual fairy. The consensus seems to be that there's way too much mythology and not nearly enough development of any of it. One of the reasons I like supernatural drama is the specific type of world-building that it requires: it's always interesting to see how writers deal with common myths, enlarging or subverting them, making rules and creating whole cultures, bringing tired tropes to life. If you asked me why I used to love True Blood I'm pretty sure the answer would be: