What happens when three romance novel readers and devotees of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series ruminate on an entire season of True Blood? Read on…

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Panelist #1 Wanderer, one of the three “opinionated booksluts” (hey, their words, not mine!) who runs The Scarlet Corset

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Thank you to Jessica for having me here on her lovely blog. I answered the invitation to blog about True Blood without hesitation; however, as I sit here typing, it’s sinking in who the other ladies are that I’m sharing this space with: Robin and Carolyn. *gulp* No pressure, none at all!

First things first, the books – yes, I have read all 9 books by Charlaine Harris and yes, I went into the viewing of the HBO show with hope that it would stick to a lot of the key points. It was probably 4 episodes into Season 1 when I scrapped that hope and decided to go with the flow created by Alan Ball.

So, what are my thoughts on Season 2? I think it started out great. The Dallas vamps and Fellowship of the Sun storylines were strong points and the Maryann storyline was the weak point. Sadly, that weak spot was stretched out over the entire season, becoming the major plot in the end. I was annoyed from the start by Maryann and how Tara fell for her BS but then to watch it progress over the entire season – it was just too much. The wobbly distortion thing, the horned helmet, the mass possessions, the black eyes, the orgies…way too much! When I watched the finale and what happened to Maryann, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why couldn’t they do that sooner?”

Sookie and Bill – I’ve had issues with Anna Paquin’s portrayal of Sookie but try to ignore it and just watch the show as any other fan. Something about the TV Sookie doesn’t sit right with me. She seemed almost selfish at times. I never got that vibe in the books. As for Bill, I’ve always considered him a mediocre character (both book and TV versions). He and Sookie are alright together but anytime Eric is involved, Bill is totally overshadowed. Side note about the actor who portrays Bill: he’s gotten better but for a while he would pronounce Sookie as “Sukay” – made me laugh every time!

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Eric – Not since the Rachel Shag has there been such hoopla over a haircut. When I saw the first scene after the haircut it was like, hot damn! The trumpets sounded, a light shone down upon him and a sigh was heard across the land. What? That didn’t happen in your house? ;) Anyway, I’m enjoying Alexander Skarsgard’s portrayal of Eric which is cool because I didn’t think
he fit the role when I first heard of his casting. I hope in Season 3 we’ll see more of Eric, Pam and Fangtasia. I want to see more of him as the leader he is. Speaking of seeing more, wasn’t that a lovely little dream sequence? Definitely saw another side of Eric!

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Jessica, Hoyt, Lorena and Godric were surprises for me. Jessica was too whiny at first but she grew on me this season. She and Hoyt are very sweet together and I don’t like the turn her character takes in the finale. I was glad to see Lorena and hoped she’d cause more trouble for Bill but then she sort of departed on a whimper. Godric’s final scene is probably my favorite of the season. The idea of having lived so long a life, seen and done so much, and now you’re ready to go out on your terms? I thought it was a very powerful scene.

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Lafayette, Arlene, Sam, Tara – These are the characters I feel are most different from the books. I’m glad they kept Lafayette and I like the current path Arlene’s character is on. I hope they don’t take the route the books take with her. Sam is like background noise for me. I mostly feel sorry for him because he seems to be the guy that gets crapped on all the time. My impression of Tara is too heavily influenced by the Maryann thing so I’m hoping Season 3 will bring her better material. Right now, I wish she’d go away.

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Jason – He is probably the character most true to the book. One slight change in the show is his and Sookie’s relationship. I liked the scene where they have a heart-to-heart after the bombing.

Misc final thoughts – The finale has a nice scene where most of the main characters are back at Merlotte’s. It was nice to see the gang back in a central place. When all is said and done, some people can’t watch because of the bad accents. I don’t mind them. Some think the acting is horrible. I think the acting is fine. Some don’t like the differences from the books. I’m ok with them. If I’m entertained at the end of the hour, I am a contented viewer.

Panelist #2: Romance novelist Carolyn Jewel

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Mandatory Disclaimer: I have read all of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books. I’m also a romance author myself. What I’m not is a television watcher. I haven’t watched television for twenty years, aside from monitoring my son’s TV watching when he was young. (Sponge Bob, yeah!) I didn’t watch Season 1 of True Blood when it was on HBO, but I heard the talk about the show — what’s not to love about vampires? — and then downloaded and read a free copy of the first Sookie Stackhouse book on my iPhone (followed, shortly thereafter by my purchasing all the rest of the books). I bought the season 1 DVD and was just as hooked by the series as I was by the books.

My household then subscribed to HBO for the sole purpose of yours truly being able to watch season 2 of True Blood; the only television I have watched in twenty years. Despite what I’m about to say, I’m not sorry and I will be re-subscribing to HBO in time to watch Season 3.

My feelings about season 2 can be pretty much summed up by my feelings about the finale: Not enough Eric and seriously flawed by a major story line that lacked cohesiveness and tension. I refer, of course, to the Maryanne storyline. Maryanne, by the way, was brilliantly acted by Michelle Forbes.

Throughout season 2 I was sorry to watch Tara, one of my favorite characters, get shuttled into an offensive mess of a storyline that failed in every respect. They took her out of her interesting and transgressive relationship with Sam the shapeshifting bartender and plunked her into a nice little box of color. A show that is about the wrongs of prejudice segregated its African American actors and plunged them into every single racial stereotype known to American culture. Drug dealing, poverty, substance abuse, single-parent homes, absent fathers, domestic violence, you name it, the cliche was played out for us.

Why, I would like to know, were NONE of these characters able to figure out there was something wrong with Maryanne and her situation? Instead, Maryanne simply had a cadre of mindless slaves who did her bidding. Even worse, the relationship between Tara and Eggs (with a name like that, you knew he was marked for death) was suspect from the start in that at no time was it clear that Eggs was not a bad guy. Why on earth would I believe their relationship was true in any sense, when we never knew if Eggs was really a good person? He was Maryanne’s from the start. What a waste of some fantastic actors. By the time of the finale, with its focus on this disastrous storyline, the damage was done. I didn’t believe and I didn’t really care.

Thus, in the season finale, the Maryanne story line continued its wonderfully acted train wreck. I was sorry but not surprised to see those scenes descend into farce. The ostrich egg licking? What on earth does the Pallas Athena myth have to do with an egg? It was pointless and absurd. Jason and Andy continued to provide beautifully done comic relief up until the moment when they, too, were suddenly Maryanne zombies. I was so very disappointed by that cheap outcome.

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The series is picking up on Sookie’s non-human lineage — a lineage that Sookie’s brother Jason shares. Why wasn’t he immune too? The bulk of the finale was taken up by Maryanne with its nearly complete lack of tension and conflict. The means by which Maryanne met her end was quite satisfying but did we really have to suffer through all that soggy, tension-less mess to get there? All I can say is I’m glad that train wreck is over.

The best parts of the season and the finale were Romance focused; Jessica and Hoyt, Bill and Sookie, Sookie and Eric (except there was no Sookie and Eric in the finale. What where they thinking?)

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Stephen Moyer continued to show his acting chops when he feared Sookie was going to turn down his proposal of marriage. That scene was almost worth the mess that came before. But really, why, with all the wonderful tension between Bill, Sookie and Eric was the cliffhanger ending not more subtle? And why was Eric almost completely absent? We are, of course, to believe that Eric is responsible for Bill’s abduction. (The writers seem to have failed to appreciate the devious nature of Ms. Harris’s version of Eric. Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Eric, hasn’t, but the writers sure have.)

I have hopes this won’t be so appallingly simplistic as we get into Season 3. We’ve already seen that the major deviations from the book have, by and large, been disappointing. And by the way, Jason’s actions at the end were completely out of character. I expected much, much more. But I’ll still be tuning in to Season 3 to see what Alexander Skarsgard does with his role.

Panelist #3 Robin, blogger of Dear Author and Romancing the Blog Fame, and Twitterer extraordinaire

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‘Twas Dionysus proved our ruin; now I see it all. – The Bacchae by Euripides

If I had unlimited time and any measure of creativity, I’d write my summary of True Blood: Season in the style of The Bacchae, since so much of Alan Ball’s interpretive dance with Harris’s novels strikes me as a retelling of the Dionysian myth as dramatized by Euripides.

First let me confess my own prejudices: as a slavishly devoted fan of Charlaine Harris’s books, I’ve been alternately amused by and frustrated with the HBO series. I adore the opening song and visual sequence, find Alexander Skarsgard incredibly sexy if not perfectly cast as Eric, and think Stephen Moyer is a spot on Bill Compton. I still cannot see Sam as anything but strawberry blonde and comforting in his physical presence, though, and Anna Paquin annoys me on a regular basis. Then there is the Tara problem: the one character whose race is changed becomes the stereotypical angry black woman who has everything bad happen to her and can’t make one good choice. And she falls for the obviously dubious charms of the psycho maenad. Great.

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When I first heard that Ball was going to adapt the series, I was thrilled; who better to interpret the outsider theme of Harris’s books? Who better to fill in all the blanks of life in Bon Temps that Sookie does not have access to because of the first person narrative limitation in the books? Sensationalism, the dissembling that goes on in “respectable” families and towns, social hypocrisy – it’s all in Ball’s repertoire. Race and sexuality are both obvious issues in the tv series and the books, and Ball has been overtly investigating those via the supernatural beings (and Lafayette’s character, whose persistence has been a happy change from the books, as has the attention Jason’s character has gotten, and I wonder how much of that is driven by the talent of Ellis and Kwanten). And he’s been far more willing to delve into the violence of the vamps, something Sookie has been more reluctant to dwell on in the books.

But then there’s the maenad storyline.

Anyone who’s familiar with the myth or has read the Euripides play knows that the Bacchae, aka the maenads, represent chaos — celebration, intoxication, sensuality, and fertility gone to an irrational, violent extreme. Dionysus, the god of wine, is linked to nature, to the feminine, to madness, and to sexual indulgence. In Euripides’s play, Dionysus has been rejected, his worship made illegal, and his mother humiliated and disbelieved (for her truthful story that Zeus impregnated her with him). So Dionysus comes to extract his political and personal revenge. So while it is technically true that Dionysus catalyzes the destruction, Euripides complicates the idea that he’s completely at fault, suggesting instead that the suppression and rejection of Dionysian characteristics results in their tenfold manifestation. It’s the classic yin and yang: Apollo’s reason is essential, but so is Dionysus’s revelry.

But what’s up with Ball’s use of the maenad? There’s definitely an element of revenge (against Sam), and some kind of perverse punishment for a town of majorly judgmental folks, and, I think some general perversity for the sake of tweaking the establishment and illustrating the fine line between “civilization” and “chaos,” as well as the underbelly ugliness of the cannibalistic sentiments that characterize all the petty hatreds among the Ben Temps humans. And Ball keeps to the tradition of feminization in using Maryann to represent the maenad.

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But then there’s Tara, the conduit for Maryann’s infiltration of Bon Temps. Tara, with the alcoholic mother and a bad history with men. Who’s angry and feels deprived and like an outcast when Maryann intervenes on her behalf. Tara, who falls so very easily under Maryann’s spell and into Eggs’s bed. And who opens to door to Maryann’s victimization of the town by inviting her to stay in Sookie’s house, by serving as the intermediary between the town and Maryann. What’s up with that? If Maryann ultimately represents some sort of chaotic, unthinking violence, what does that make Tara? And what about the “family” that Maryann’s entourage  represents for Tara? It’s clearly cultish, although attractive at first. So what’s the lesson – that it’s dangerous to long so much for belonging? That we can’t trust the angry black woman? That women are irrational? That it’s not gays and blacks who are the threat but women wearing bull’s heads? That we’re all easily compromised unless we have supernatural aspects of our personality that make us immune?

Seriously, if I could answer those questions, I might be able to understand what the hell I spent a bunch of hours over the past few months watching. Sophie Ann’s cryptic lines about how powers exist because we will them into existence seems like it should be meaningful, but I’m not sure how. I mean, what doesn’t exist without us willing it into existence?

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Had I not been so disgusted with the hijacking that Maryann’s story represented to me, and had I not been so frustrated with how that stripped so much nuance out of Harris’s vision, I might not be so intent on understanding the purpose of the maenad subplot. And I suspect that it was ultimately a vague, somewhat abstract revenge fantasy that has little relationship to the novels and makes little sense to the overall logic of the first half of the TV series. Except that it allowed the writers to go hog (bull?) wild with the blood and the gore, the sensationalized violence that’s becoming more and more central to the tv series. All of which leaves me feeling cranky and unsatisfied. And in need of a glass of wine.

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A concluding note From Jessica:

Thank you so much Wanderer, Carolyn, and Robin. I selfishly wanted to know more of your thoughts on the show than you could explain in 140 character Tweets, and I was not disappointed. See you all in — gasp — nine months for Season 3.

Nobody discussed in detail my favorite element of Season 2, The Fellowship of the Sun, aka Alan Ball’s hysterical sendup of a certain kind of hypocritical, fanatical, evangelical Christians. I have to throw in a pic because it makes me smile:

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PS. Here you go Robin! May it go down easier in Season 3!

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And finally, for those of you (like me) who missed it, here’s an image of Charlaine Harris’s Season 2 finale cameo:

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