NEW! True Blood - Season 2 SPOILERS - LA Times Feature Story, Cast Interviews

Photo credit : John P. Johnson / HBO

Really fun feature story on True Blood coming out in Sunday's L.A.Times. The article is available online for those of us who don't buy the Times. There are spoilers in the article penned by Jessica Gelt, which pertain to the latter half of Season 2.

Since True Blood interviews have saturated the Internet and will continue on the airwaves this week coming with Stephen Moyer appearing Wednesday on both the ABC daytime chat-fest, The View, and late that night on Jimmy Fallon (check your local listings for info) , I was a bit more interested in things that have not yet caught my eye. Like for example the incredible access that fan-site truebloodnet.com gets is due to it now being pseudo-sponsored by HBO which "helps secure interviews for (them)," even taking one of the webmasters "on a guided tour of the show's set."

Since the interview also plugs "Bill's Babes," which originates from the website The Vault,

my money is on the likelihood that they too have a "special relationship" with HBO.

That's all well and good IMO--anything that promotes the show--though the lines are getting blurry as to what is official and what isn't. This reflects in part the breakneck-speed changes in how we distribute and assimilate media. That sort of works in the favour of people like me who approach the show from a different perspective but like to have access to information surrounding it.

Since Ms. Gelt, the women of truebloodnet.com, and even True Blood showrunner Alan Ball seem to feel that True Blood is a women's show, I won't take issue with that but it is not why I tuned in. (I also suspect that because of the show's tolerance of all forms of sexuality--male-female,male-male, etc. that it may have a larger gay-bi-lesbian following than anyone is talking about publicly. Six Feet Under was also very tolerant, portraying a realistic long-term homosexual relationship--one of the things that contributed to its greatness, I think.)

I saw the adverts for True Blood a week or two before it's debut in 2008. It was marketed as "from the maker of Six Feet Under" which made me sit up and notice and "starring Anna Paquin." With that, I decided on the spot that I'd give it a go and I was fairly certain after being wrapped up in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under for it's entire run that True Blood would be good, if not great, too.

I've been a vampire lover since reading Bram Stoker's Dracula at age 9. My father, who is a big science fiction and to a lessor extent, fantasy reader had it on the bookshelf and it looked intriguing. I read it right through--twice and even at that young age I was aware of the sensuous undertones. Much later came Anne Rice and The Vampire Lestat and though I enjoyed several of Ms. Rice's books it wasn't until Brad Pitt did his turn as the tortured, beautiful vampire "Louis" in the film "Interview With The Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles" that I truly got sucked in (no pun intended) to the notion that as Mr. Ball puts it, "Vampires are sex."

"True Blood" on HBO follows the romance between waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and her soul mate, 173- year-old vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer).
The bomb that shattered the living room left carnage in its wake. The floor is slick with blood, tattered bodies litter the room, entrails dangle from the ceiling and an unrecognizable mass of goo stuck to the wall erratically spurts jets of mauve blood.

"I'm gonna ask everyone to clear the set who is not actually dying on it," yells Scottie Gissel, a first assistant director for HBO's hit vampire series " True Blood," which launches into its second season of sensational Gothic gore and lusty, undead romance next Sunday. (Viewers will see the scene of explosive destruction that Gissel is stage-managing late in the season.)
On this sunny afternoon, the cast and crew work in overdrive on a gloomy, fog-soaked soundstage at the Lot on Santa Monica and Formosa. They labor with the assuredness of a project vindicated. After getting off to a rocky start critically last fall, "True Blood," based on the books by Charlaine Harris and created by Alan Ball, who created "Six Feet Under" and wrote "American Beauty," steadily built its audience to emerge as HBO's most popular show in recent years, with an average of 7.8 million viewers watching each episode by the end of Season 1.
With a fervent fan base, including nearly half a dozen fan-run websites that HBO -- in a forward-thinking approach to managing public opinion -- actively fosters, "True Blood" is hoping to prove with its sophomore season that even in the "Twilight" age of vampire overkill, it can maintain its success.

Unrest hits undead

"True Blood" takes place in a world where vampires have come out of the coffin , so to speak, aided by the invention of a synthetic blood substitute called Tru Blood that helps keep their primal appetites at bay. Still, prejudice against the undead abounds, with many of the show's human characters motivated by a hate and fear that is as gruesomely destructive as that of even the most unrepentant bloodsucker.
Season 1 established the main action: "True Blood" is set in the fictional backwater town of Bon Temps, La., where a telepathic good girl named Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) works as a waitress in a raucous bar called Merlotte's. When a mysterious vampire named Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) comes to town, Sookie falls in love with him. A high body count and muddy graveside sex ensue....

As he leads an on-set tour of Bill's cryptic, mossy mansion, Moyer says that he and Paquin were in England when Season 1 first aired, so they never got the chance to watch it.
In the real world, the pair are dating and live together. They kept their romance a secret for 10 months before coming out with it on set; its inception was aided by the fact that during filming for the pilot "HBO very stupidly put us in the same hotel," says Moyer, adding that he knew "True Blood" was building a fan base but didn't realize the scope of it until someone sent Paquin a shirt emblazoned with the words, Bill's Babes."

"She was like, 'I'm the original Bill's babe,' and she would occasionally wear the shirt around the house," says Moyer...
... Ball says... says, although... deeper topics are definitely present, the show, its fans and its creator are primarily concerned with campy glee.
"I needed fun," he says. " 'Six Feet Under' was a really gratifying emotional and artistic experience, but it's hard to spend five years peering into that existential abyss. This one is just fun. It's so much fun."

Paquin thinks so too. Walking around the set in a dirt-and-blood-stained white coat and high heels, her shiny blond hair matted and fake glass sticking out of her slender calves, Paquin asks the crew and visitors for hugs and jokes about how fabulous she looks...
What fans are responding to, says Paquin, is the fact that "True Blood" is an "exciting, big-concept, plot-driven, really high-class soap opera."
And like in any good soap opera, Moyer knows that no matter how you chew on the show's politics, it all really comes back to sex. Biting, specifically. His dark eyes glittering with mischief, he says: "There wasn't a hole there before and there's a hole there now. It's sexy. There's no getting away from it. If you want to scrape away at it, scrape away, but it's really sexy stuff."