True Blood: Season 2

My post on Season 1 didn't really say a thing about this show, so I'll let this one serve as a reflection on the series so far. For one thing, it moves fast. I had no problems plowing through three to five episodes a day, and that's how I was able to watch 24 of them in just a week and a half. But for a show that feels like it goes by so fast, there's honestly not a whole lot that happens in it. Season-long story arcs can be summarized in a few sentences and, two full seasons in, I still feel as though I've barely scratched the surface of the show's mythology and ever-increasing cast of characters. Contrast this with The Wire, an extremely dense show whose first two seasons took me something like four months to get through. Since  you invest so much effort and attention in that show, you reap a great reward. True Blood's only reward, by comparison, is the mostly mindless entertainment it provides. And I don't say that demeaningly. This is "guilty pleasure" TV at its finest. It's got all the right ingredients: an array of well-developed main characters with extreme personalities, plenty of cheap and manufactured drama, an interesting and ever-growing (if slightly silly) mythology. Oh, and plenty of titties. No, seriously, there have been like three or four separate episodes with blood orgies, and regular "vanilla" vampire sex happens every other episode. Again, the show's got an admittedly silly and hollow premise. Vampires have "come out of the coffin" to the world at large, but they struggle to co-exist with humans out in the open. They fight for "vampire rights" but plenty of regular people are opposed to treating them as equals. There are assholes and decent folks of either "race," however, and the long-term point of the show appears to be about vampires as they struggle for equal rights. But the shorter, seasonal arcs so far have involved a small town serial killer murder mystery and a demon-goddess thing taking over the same small town and, well, killing a few people too. (But also hypnotizing nearly everyone into sex-crazed zombie-like followers. Because, you know, titties.) I'm not sure what the production value and ratings are for True Blood (I want to say "medium" and "high" for HBO, respectively) but I could honestly see the show lasting for many, many years, with each season devoting the bulk of its time to whatever interesting and bizarre danger plagues the small town this year while still contributing a good chunk of time to the overall nationwide struggle for vampire rights. My understanding is that each season of the show is based on a novel in an existing series, and that that series is something like ten or fourteen books long. So, yeah. Like I said, this could really be an HBO mainstay for a long, long time. And frankly, that's fine by me. I've enjoyed it so far. It's nothing I'd proudly call one of the best shows on TV by any stretch, but I'm sure that's not a distinction True Blood ever set out to earn. It's fun, it's simple, and I'll definitely be watching the third season whenever my girlfriend's DVD set from Amazon comes.