What follows is a true formless rant. And spoilers everywhere.
Ah True Blood. Fuckyou.com What a shitty second season you delivered me. No, you weren’t completely awful. You had your moments. The Stackhouse at the crazy religious camp storyline was cool. Godric was bad ass. But then you killed him, two episodes into his career. And Eric was cool. For a bit.
But now he’s just another boring ass love story. Last night’s season finale managed to capture in one hour what the entire season was. A half-hour of storyline, a half-hour of filler.
Let’s think about this for a second. The Maryann storyline was like fifteen episodes long. It should have been like three, but they dragged it out mercilessly. And then, for some reason which I cannot fathom, they ended it in fourteen minutes. What followed was a shitty promotional video for season three. I knew that I had lost faith in True Blood when, last night, the entire cast was playing the ukulele while awaiting the birth of some God or some shit.
And then Maryann is killed by Sam, because she’s tricked into believing a God has come. I GET IT RELIGIOUS COMMENTARY. EVEN GODS CAN BE FORCED TO BELIEVE SOMETHING IF THEY WANT IT BAD ENOUGH.
How do you take Eric and make him suck? Easy, you embroil him in a boring ass love story. Eric was the Boba Fett of True Blood. He was cool because he kicked ass, didn’t say much, and received just enough screen time for him to seem ominous and righteous and cool and shit. But in the span of three or four episodes, you have him giggling and smiling and weeping as Godric dies like a little punk idiot. THEN, you have him naked in dream sequences with Sookie? You have to be out of your God damn mind. What a pile of bullshit.
This show is like the Office with vampires. Will Sookie choose Eric? Or will she choose Bill? OMFG.
I DON’T FUCKING CARE.
Monday -I Love You Alan Ball, Now Never Write True Blood Again
August 31st, 2009 by Caffeine Powered[ spoilers from 8/30, you've been warned. ]
I know that Alan Ball is all whacky and amazing and he’s responsible for Six Feet Under and American Beauty and True Blood. But with that in mind, I’d like to kindly ask him to never write True Blood again. Ball’s sporadic appearances on True Blood raise important issues I have with television shows and comic books. They both routinely feature different writers interpreting the same characters. But let’s stick to one issue here. True Blood.
Here’s the first problem with Alan Ball on True Blood. He doesn’t write it every episode, but he acts like he does. The various writers that contribute to True Blood work to create a cohesive universe. They pay respect to the other writers’ work on developing characters, and script their episodes accordingly. And then Alan Ball comes in and he’s all:
In his episodes, Ball throws the characters’ behaviors and development out the window for his view of how they act. For example, his Jason Stackhouse is a bumbling redneck retard. To the zillionth degree. His Lafayette is uber hood.
Stackhouse is appealing because he’s the idiot kid who may have some cerebral activity, but it’s consistently stifled before it can brim over the top. He’s always the lovable retard, but Ball plays that up to the point of nausea. Jason’s arc and redemption in the L.O.D.I episodes proved him to be a nuanced dumb ass, not some slapstick retard. I love his stupidity as much as anyone, but I love that underneath it all, he’s redeemable. How stoked were you when he capped Steve Newlin in his dumb Bible-Thumping-Face?
And then there’s Lafayette. Lafayette’s arc on the show was really friggin’ interesting at the begin of the season. Tortured and left for dead in a dungeon, Lafayette’s character had been turned inside out. He had seen the darkness, and we got to see a guy wounded emotionally and physically from that sort of serious shit.
Then Ball steps in.
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