What kind of entertainment does Dracula like? Something in a jugular vein. Which brings us to the Second Season premiere of HBO’s True Blood (tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO Canada). Check out the promo below:
This season, Sookie and Compton (Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer) “dust off” their relationship after that near burnup in broad daylight at the end of last season. There’s also the pay off to that mysterious body outside the diner where Sookie works. We learn more about Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), the rebellious teen-vampire Compton had to sire to make up for killing a fellow bloodsucker. Bar owner Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) sticks doggedly to his shape-shifting ways. Sookie’s troublemaker sibling Jason (Ryan Kwanten) gets mixed up with an anti-vampire sect. And Evan Rachel Wood guest stars as the Vampire Queen of Louisiana.
Read all about it in the feature I wrote in today’s Toronto Star. Spoke with Charlaine Harris, the author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. Based in southern Arkansas, her southern drawl is not unlike the Louisiana accent the characters have in the series.
Harris has done okay with these books. Seven of them were on the New York Times bestsellers list earlier this year. She said she hand picked Alan Ball to executive produce the series because she felt he would stay true to her vision of the vampire drama. Mission accomplished, she says, although she allows that the series is sexier than the books.
As for why the public’s so thirsty for vampire tales, Harris has a theory: “I think our culture is youth obsessed,” she says, “and the idea of creatures that stay forever at their peak, that don’t have to worry about arthritis, cataracts, cellulite…isn’t that the American ideal?”
