HBO: True Blood, Episode 1

True Blood, the new HBO series from Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) debuts tomorrow night, but through a fortuitous sequence of events attending screenings at TIFF, we managed to get our hands on a screener copy of the first episode. So we gave it a spin. Sexy, seductive, bitingly sardonic and just a bit crazy, the show has all the hallmarks of a brand new runaway hit for HBO—it’s like Twilight for adults.

Warning: mild spoilers behind the jump.

Life in the backwater Louisiana town of Bon Temps moves at a slow, laborious, swampy redneck sort of pace; the girls are cute-as-button waitresses, the guys drive pickup trucks, and the vampires attract quite a bit of glamor and attention. Oh, didn’t we mention there were vampires? Perhaps we should explain.

Vampires have always existed in the shadows of societies, and it was with great shock and surprise two years ago when they emerged “out of the coffin” so to speak and announced their presence to the rest of the world. The recent technological development of Japanese synthetic human blood (which satisfies all their nutritional requirements) has allowed the vampire race to eschew the dark shadows and emerge into the world. Now that they need not hunt their human prey for sustenance, they only wish to live beside them in harmony and respect.

This is the kind of base level insanity that exists in True Blood, a world where vampires and humans co-exist in love and harmony. Okay, well, they co-exist at the very least. While most people are wary and distrustful of their new dark neighbors, there are plenty of vampire groupies, sexual fetishists and drug abusers looking to explore and exploit them. Let’s face it: vampires are pretty sexy after all, and both vampire and human alike are willing to pay a lot of money to spend the night with one another and bite/get bitten (depending on your tastes.) In addition, human junkies have taken to harvesting vampire blood from “living” donors and injecting it into their own bodies—the ensuing high, if the human survives, is out of this world.

Enter young waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin, The Piano, X-Men) at the local bar, Merlotte’s Bar and Grill. She looks like the sweet girl next door, but she harbors a deep secret—namely, everyone else’s secrets. She has the uncanny ability to hear people’s thoughts, although she vehemently denies her psychic prowess to her family and friends, who have noticed her quirky and uncanny abilities. Things complicate even further when the bar gets its first vampire patron; a 173-year old named Bill (Stephen Moyer, Quills). Sookie is immediately drawn to the stranger, as he is the only person she has ever met whose thoughts she cannot read. She finds the silence—and the vampire—extremely attractive, much to the horror of her vampire-fearing friends. Perhaps even more alarming, Bill seems to find Sookie as equally fascinating…

True Blood exhibits all the breakout qualities of a fantastic show: a large, diverse and immediately appealing cast, a gimmick with near-limitless possibilities, plenty of undead sex and a dark biting humor, no pun intended. Adapted from Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampires Mysteries series of novels, True Blood is sexy, dark and steamy, heightened by the swampy locale and dark southern roots, set to bluesy music by Gary Calamar (Dexter, Weeds, Entourage).

Call it a hunch, but given the general resurgence of vampire-related books and cinema (*cough* Twilight) recently, this show should appeal to those of us misfortunate enough not to be thirteen year-old girls. The show is sexy, dark and hilarious, a perfect trio, and has a surprisingly light and chipper atmosphere in comparison to Alan Ball’s previous HBO offering. Six Feet Under was great and all, but damned if all the maudlin didn’t get to you after a while. In comparison, the atmosphere, albeit dark and sinister, has a quirky charm to it; a tongue-in-cheek sardonic edge that illuminates the show’s inherent comedic and Harlequin aspects, like a soap opera on vampire steroids.

Or to put it another way; if Six Feet Under was a lime green hearse, True Blood is like a big, sweaty motorcycle cruising through the swamps of Louisiana at breakneck speeds with a girl on the back, reaching her hand into your leather chaps. Check out the trailer below:

True Blood debuts Sunday September 7th at 9PM EST on HBO, and on The Movie Network in Canada.

Our verdict: watch it. This one should be huge.