True Blood: Season 6

True Blood has never been great television, but at its best it's been good enough summer television. It's stupid and frivolous and sexy and it doesn't often take itself too seriously and it's occasionally as inconsistent with its own mythos and rules as Heroes was. The series finale is in a couple days, so I figured I amy as well get myself caught up, starting with this penultimate season. And why not? There's nothing else on TV these days. (Seriously.)

This already absurd-beyond-repair show hit an all time low early on in Season 6, breaking through the rock bottom that was Season 5's ending and doing so with determination and vigor. In my brief and disappointed Season 5 post, I wrote: "The show is attempting to serve like thirteen different characters at this point, and rather than have them run around in the same circles it just threw them in pairs at completely unrelated stories that didn't seem to add anything at all to the mythology or overall narrative of True Blood." That rang entirely true here, too, and early on things were as spread out and uninteresting as I could imagine. (Bill is a vampire god! Alcide is a werewolf packmaster! Sam's got to protect a young shapeshifter! Andy's got fairy quadruplet babies! Terry still has PTSD! Sookie is in a dream world getting ravaged by the guy who killed her parents! Lafayette still exists!)

But then something interesting happened. Specifically, nearly every completely absurd storyline just kind of slowly faded away by the middle of the season, leaving us with a somewhat entertaining A-story - the first one True Blood has had since Season 2. Every vampire on the show - and at this point, that's half the characters - independently ends up incarcerated in some kind of vampire internment camp. It's amazing how much better even a crappy show like this one gets when it puts most of its best characters in a position to interact with one another. I wound up liking this season more than I expected to like it, particularly after the first three episodes or so. That's not to say that it was good television; it just finally realized it didn't need to tell ten different stories with fifteen different characters. I've got no reason to assume I'll like Seasoon 7, but this was a minor unexpected surprise.