Pop Goes the World
I’m sitting here happily bopping my head to the newest Miley Cyrus single, “Can’t Be Tamed,” which I finally found on iTunes. I have wanted it since seeing the video in this post on Tiger Beatdown. Later, I will be playing it loudly in the car, singing along as I drive, thinking about slut shaming. And that, my friends, is the wonder of pop culture, and why I love it so.
The other night I was gchatting with Dan. I mentioned having to explain sexual napalm to a friend who doesn’t keep up with such things, and then had to explain it to him as well. I still don’t get how it grossed him out. I find the whole story hilarious, especially Simpson getting so upset over it. She’s fine with her father discussing her breasts, but cries to Oprah about a man calling her sexually addictive? After disgusting him, I had to try and justify why I know such things, why following celebrity gossip is important to someone like me who works in Hollywood and is trying to work my way towards writing for TV, why you have to be able to drop a perfect zeitgeist joke in a spec, be able to make that joke in an interview. He wanted to talk about a Mother Jones piece on media being kept away from the BP spill in the Gulf. I’d already read about it on Gawker, heard horror stories from my dad about the ineptitude of the training BP is giving clean up workers, and unnatural disasters are something even I can’t do good banter about. I felt a little judged for preferring to discuss something I can laugh about. Besides, BP keeping the media away is bad, discussion over, next topic, please.
But pop culture and gossip, you can jump all over the place, from shallowest topical to the deep meaning behind it, from How It Makes You Feel to What It Means. When I talk about Lindsey Lohan, I’m not just talking about her latest drunken fall outside a club, I’m talking about if Hollywood would care how fucked up she was if she was able to party and still show up and work like Robert Downey Jr. and Keifer Sutherland back in the Brat Pack days. I resent being forced to know who Heidi and Spencer are, but I wonder why they matter, why people buy magazines if they’re on the cover. We didn’t need “Team Sandra,” t-shirts, because what other team was there? In this fractured world, celebrity gossip is a common denominator, low as it may be. We may not know our neighbors, but we know who Cameron Diaz is dating. And why Kate Hudson is pissed about it.
I’m not saying we should all drop our subscriptions to the New York Times and pick up Us Weekly. Too many people have, and that’s why we have Glenn Back and Sarah Palin. But there’s nothing wrong with having interests on both sides of the news, hard and soft. Like Kate Nash says in the awesome “Mansion Song,” “I read The Guardian, and Glamour.” Being intelligent and well-informed shouldn’t mean you’re shamed by friends for knowing about the latest pop star feud as well.
It also shouldn’t mean that you walk around wearing a shirt proclaiming, “Kill Your TV.” If TV rots your brain you’re doing it wrong. Aristotle’s Poetics applies just as much to Lost as Oedipus. I’m sure there’s already someone writing a paper on Jack Shepard as tragic hero. Does a chronic need to fix things count as a tragic flaw? Hubris was always my favorite in class discussions; you could always make a case for hubris. Some of the best storytelling around is being done in television today, with stories that play out over time like chapters in a novel. Anna Karenina? Great big soap opera. Yet it’s taken seriously and Gossip Girl is something you make excuses for watching. The plots can be ridiculous, and Josh Schwartz needs to learn how to build suspense and stop just churning through story, but the characters and dialogue are sharp, and there are moments of brilliance. Usually involving Chuck and/or Blair, but Little J’s story in the season finale was strong, deep and easy to identify with. Supernatural was fantastic this season, riffing on which is better, Peace or Freedom? And doing it with whip smart one liners. (I’ll say it again, so much better than Lost, even though the finale wasn’t as epic as I’d hoped for in a battle against Lucifer). Now that all my fun shows are done for the season, I’m catching up on Breaking Bad. It’s Shakespearean in its level of setting the train on the tracks to tragedy. Walt made the choice to start cooking meth in the pilot, seeing it as a way to make money for his family as he was dying of cancer, and that mistake has set him on a path he cannot leave, taking Jesse and his family with him. It’s dark, epic, weird, and occasionally sickly comic.
And, just like gossip, TV is something that can bring us together. The Lost finale was all over the media this week, with discussions about the show itself to what it meant to the television industry. We may watch a show alone at home on our couch, but we talk about it with our friends at work or on the internet. I used to be deep into the Television Without Pity boards back in the Buffy days, and I had friends from there I never met in real life but who knew more about me than co-workers. I’m FB friends with a friend’s girlfriend, and she and I may not have much in common, but we gab back and forth about Chuck Bass and how much we’re looking forward to True Blood coming back. Societies are brought together and defined by their popular culture, whether it be the cafe society of fin de siecle Vienna, the great novels of 19th century Russia, or the exploits of rich teens on the Upper East Side of New York today. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Boner Killer
I’m a proud feminist, but I’m no Sady. I don’t quite get cisgender versus transgender. I took film theory in college, not gender studies. Even so, when Katherine Bigelow used the term scopophilia in an interview I had to look it up to remember all the layers of meaning it has. I remember talking to my film theory prof after a class on Silence of the Lambs and the backlash from gay rights groups about Buffalo Bill and how it angered me that women didn’t band together and complain about negative portrayals of us in the media. That was more than 10 years ago, and we still aren’t complaining and the image of women in the media hasn’t gotten any better. In places, it’s gotten worse (like The Bachelor, where women fight over a man like hungry jackals over a carcass).
I’ve caught a few episodes of Buffy recently, and was again annoyed by the fact that Buffy always needed to have a boyfriend. She may have been The Slayer, with the power to take out vamps and demons all on her own, but she would have rather been a popular cheerleader dating the quarterback. I prefer Veronica Mars, who was usually dating someone, but because she wanted to, not because she felt incomplete without a man. Veronica was awesome, whip smart and snarky, creative in her vengeance. Of course she barely made it three seasons.
I was reading Entertainment Weekly’s Summer Movie Preview issue, and was about halfway through the article on the Angelina Jolie movie Salt when I wanted to throw the magazine across the room and scream. See, originally the main character in the script was a man, but Angelina had been looking for a “female James Bond-style franchise,” so Sony changed the character from Edwin Salt to Evelyn. But they couldn’t just change the gender, because in the original, Salt saves his wife from danger, and having a woman save her husband “seemed to castrate his character a little.” And that sentence was when I started screaming. Because, really? Having Angelina fucking Jolie save a guy emasculates him? I could see a man feeling a little wussy if he had to be saved by Paris Hilton or an Olson twin, but Angelina? She’s hot, and the fact that she can kick most guys’ asses is part of her attraction. She famously enjoys doing her own stunts. And in real life, she flies the family plane, and Brad carries the luggage and herds the kids. I guess that means he can hit those high notes now, if the studio suits are right.
While the studio suits are worrying about women in film and TV getting too strong, the men are devolving into eternal adolescents. Fucking Judd Apatow. I liked The 40 Year Old Virgin, but I think that was mostly because of Steve Carell. His character was the most mature of the bunch, and I kept waiting for him to point out to his friends that their ideas about going for “drunk bitches” are tantamount to saying, “Date rape is a great way to get girls in bed!” But he never did. Superbad would have been an episode of SVU if it had been about jocks trying to get girls drunk enough to have sex, but since it was geeks, it was a comedy! The women in these films are thinly written and serve mostly to keep the boys from having any fun. Katherine Heigl got mean flack for speaking up and saying that her character in Knocked Up was shrill, and everyone wondered why she didn’t complain during the film. Seeing as Apatow cast his own wife as a boner killing shrew so uptight her husband has to lie to hang out with his friends, I doubt he would have listened to her ideas on character development. It’s a boys’ club, and they’ll pull up the ladder if a girl wants in to the treehouse.
The worst insult for these guys is to be compared to a girl. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Mila Kunis tells Jason Segel that she can see his vagina when he’s hesitating to jump off a cliff into the ocean. An act that she, a tiny vagina bearing woman, has already done. He makes a similar joke in I Love You Man when Paul Rudd can’t let loose and scream like a man. This is our new style romantic comedy leading man? His tits are bigger than Kate Hudson’s. If an actress wrote and starred in a film based on how she’d been dumped by someone years before she’d be seen as neurotic for dwelling on it. Segel does it and now he’s writing the new Muppet movie.
I have seen one movie that goes against all these trends. Of course it’s not American. I finally saw the Swedish version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and loved it almost as much as the book. Lisbeth Salander has been misunderstood and mistreated by the system her whole life but she refuses to be a victim. She’s brilliant, prickly, and anti-social. Noomi Rapace does an amazing job with a character who doesn’t speak much and who hides most of her emotions. The original Swedish title of the book and film was Men Who Hate Women, which should give you an idea of how brutal it can be in places. I’m careful about recommending the book since it gave one friend nightmares. Hollywood is doing a version, and I’m sure they’ll ruin it with changes. First they’ll have to get rid of the scene when tiny Salander rescues her big, strong man of a partner Blomkvist from the killer. Because that could seem to castrate his character a little.
Dogs and Cats, Living Together
I’ve watched Lost from the beginning, but I was never a rabid fan, never tracked down theories and easter eggs on the internet. They kept spoilers on lockdown, and I stopped looking for spoilers for shows at all a few years ago. In Buffy days, I was a spoiler whore. For a short time I was even a spoiler source. My roommate was friends with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stand-in, so I broke the news on TWoP of Buffy and Spike having sex. Because of me, women threw socks at James Marsters when he played with his band. It’s the small accomplishments in life that mean the most. I searched out spoilers for Buffy in part because the show could be uneven, and if something sucky was coming up you wanted to be prepared. I check the TWoP boards for True Blood for the same reason; if they’re going to ruin Eric I want to hide anything I could throw at the set before sitting down to watch. But Lost was consistently good enough that I wasn’t worried about being disappointed, and they let so few spoilers out that trying to find something to explain WTF was going on was fruitless.
I’m sure I must have pondered what the Island is, wondered about how things work in the world of the show, but mostly I think I was happy just bopping along, watching what Lindelof and Cuse did with the characters. All the science talk confused me silly and gave my flashbacks to my terrifying college theoretical physics class (why they required liberal arts majors to take a class in such things still confounds me. I don’t remember a thing, and I failed the tests whether I studied or not, so thank god for my program’s version of The Gentlemen’s C). I swear half that stuff is made up by scientists drunk and having a laugh. I just wrote it off as science fiction and was glad for an hour of network TV with intelligence. I don’t have the DVD’s, so I’ve relied on Emily Nussbaum’s recaps on nymag.com this season to remind me of old plot points being referenced. I was clear on the fact that Jack last season was annoying. Rewrite everyone’s history because you’re unhappy? Shut up whiny baby. Having daddy issues doesn’t give you the right to decide to change everyone’s fates.
The flashes sideways this season were intriguing, but I was more interested in what was happening on the Island. I even went to the show panel at the Paley Festival this year (which I wrote about already). So when Nestor Carbobell said that he had finally found out this season who and what Richard was I was intrigued. Until I saw the episode. I know I’m late with this, but it was so bad it still bothers me. Bothers me in that “Really? All these seasons of following and loving this show and you leave us with Buffy thinking about cookie dough?” way.
So the Island is a cork, meant to keep some Dark Evil in the form of The Man in Black contained. What’s next, the owls are not what they seem? An army of teenage girls with super strength and agility and a big stash of stakes?. And Jacob has spent eons luring people to the island to prove MiB wrong in his assumption that man will choose evil over good. As everyone he brings seems to end up dead I don’t think he’s winning that argument. I get that being the only two people on an island for centuries would get boring, but aren’t gods or demi-gods supposed to play chess in such situations? Maybe a nice game of “I Spy.” Because sacrificing people to prove your point that people are inherently good is a barbarous way to pass the time, and serves as a direct argument against your theory. “I’m going to prove that humanity is good by letting innocent people get killed!” No, not the best of plans, dude.
I liked last week’s episode. I don’t know why Desmond is such an interesting character. I think he’s an example of a character that was meant to be small and insignificant and somehow sparked the imagination of the writers. He’s got a life of his own, and seems to have more agency than the others. Jack and Locke argue faith versus science, Desmond just is. It’s refreshing. But the episode was still annoying. I’ve watched enough Dr Who to be familiar with the idea of alternate time lines, events that are mutable and ones that are set. So the idea that the sideways time line has to be put right not because of some big issue like having changed the course of history for the worse or even the consequences of setting off a freaking nuclear bomb, but because people aren’t with their soul mates is a little weak. Seems in this world the problems of three little people do amount to a hill of beans.
It just feels like the show is devolving into a debate in a sophomore Philosophy class at some liberal arts college. Kids with a smattering of knowledge of the classic arguments of Good vs Evil pontificating on What It All Means. I got bored quickly when I was one of those kids in the debate, so watching someone play it out with characters and an FX budget isn’t doing it for me. The purpose of drama is to take those big concepts, those overarching ideas, and bring them down to an individual level, where the viewers aren’t just watching and talking theory but are really invested and identifying with your characters and situations and are left thinking long after it’s over.
So when it comes to Good vs Evil, Fate vs Free Will, I’ll still be watching Lost, because damned if I’m going to have watched this long and not stick around for the ending, but I’m invested in the fight on Supernatural. On that show, God is a deadbeat dad, leaving his angels to run rampant on Earth, manipulating events to bring on the Apocalypse because they were bored. Lucifer and his demons know how to exploit the weaknesses of men to their ends, but the angels aren’t any better. They don’t care how many people suffer and die, they just want the war to start so they can win and have paradise on Earth. In the kind of coincidence that makes for good drama, Sam Winchester is the chosen vessel for Lucifer, and his brother Dean the vessel for the Archangel Michael. But neither wants his destined job nor do they want the Apocalypse they were manipulated into starting to come about. So they fight the forces of Good and Evil with rifles, salt, holy water, and a special demon killing dagger. Fortified by sarcasm and whiskey. Sounds a little goofy, huh? And it is. But it also tackles the big questions, and does it on a personal level. Sam and Dean die, again, and go to heaven. They run into old friends and find out that each person has his own heaven, and it is wonderful. Yet they’re still trying to get back to Earth to stop the Apocalypse. Why? their friend asks them. Billions of people will die, but they’ll come to Heaven and be happy, so why fight it? They find their way to God’s spokesman, who tells them that God knows what’s happening on Earth, but that he’s not going to intervene and stop it. They’re sent back to Earth, but with the knowledge that they are on their own, there will be no deus ex machina to save them. They’ve gone up against War and Famine and won. Last week was the Whore of Babylon, who used people’s faith and fear to turn them against each other and cause them to condemn their souls to Hell. That was a good one; when do you question the supposed Word of the Angels? When do you stand up for your neighbors if doing so will get you condemned alongside them? It’s tackling the big questions without getting up on a soapbox and proclaiming, “These are the big questions!” And this from a show that started out like a cross between Route 66 and Scooby Doo.
In the Same Vein
It’s Paley Festival time here in LA, which is like my Christmas, birthday, and prom all rolled into one. The Paley Center for Media puts on a series of panels on different TV shows, with the casts and creators present to answer questions from a moderator and from the audience. I go to a few every year; it’s around my birthday so the tickets are my present to myself. I’ve been to some amazing ones (all three Pushing Daisies, especially the one with the writers, Fringe last year was fun because of the dynamic between Joshua Jackson and John Noble, the one on the X-Files tied to the movie release was fascinating because it was mostly writers and directors and they spoke pretty openly about how grueling the show was to produce), and some less thrilling (the Dollhouse panel managed to make me dislike the show more, the cast of Gossip Girl is nowhere near as witty as their characters). This year I went to Lost last week, Vampire Diaries this week, and Glee is next week.
Lost was interesting, but heartwrenching. Not because of the panel or what they revealed, or mostly didn’t, but because it was mostly the writers and they talked about how their writers’ room works. It was like hearing the Land of Oz does exist, and how wonderful and perfect it would be for you, after years of trying to get there and doubting you ever will. My dream is being on the writing staff of a one hour drama, getting to work with other writers and making up stories all day. I’m still trying, and at least I’m writing again, but I keep my spark of hope sheltered safe and deep in my heart, trying to keep it from blowing out.
Vampire Diaries was amazing. Much like the show, I had reservations and kept my expectations low, and was then blown away. Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec, the creators of the show, were there, which would have been enough for me. I’ve been a Williamson fan since Scream, and cried like a little girl at the finale of Dawson’s Creek. He’s the reason I was willing to give the show a chance. The trailers looked pretty awful and corny, and I hadn’t been that impressed with the lead actress when she was on Degrassi. I watched each episode thinking, OK, this is the week it’s going to fall apart and suck. And it never did, it’s gotten better, deeper, more intricate. The writers are chewing through plot faster than even Josh Schwartz, but, unlike him, it’s not leaving the stories thinner and thinner. And no one has ended up fighting in a swimming pool. The writers keep revealing more detail, more backstory, more complications, and they all serve to build the characters.
I haven’t read the books the series is based on, but Williamson was open about having departed from it. Reading the books, he decided it was about the town of Mystic Falls, this weird little place with a history of the supernatural. And he built the series from there. Fans of the books are reportedly happy, so they must not mind the changes. As I’ve already mentioned, I wish Alan Ball had taken that route with True Blood and taken the whole world of the books and developed new stories from it. Williamson and Plec seem like a perfect team for this show. He hates Twilight, she loves it. He loves True Blood, she doesn’t watch it. They joked about the actress who plays Elena, Nina Dobrev, having to call Williamson to tell him she couldn’t say a line he’d written because it was exactly like one from Twilight, which he hadn’t seen. They also received a call from a director of one episode pointing out similarities with an episode of True Blood, which he had also directed. I guess there are only so many ways to have a girl in a love triangle with vampires.
The show looks amazing every week, well shot, good art direction. Williamson talked about some of the choices they had made to get that, things like leaving out the part in the book where the vampires could turn into animals because the effects would be cheap and look bad. Also the reason he cut the fog that followed the brothers- fake fog looks fake. Listening to a writer/producer talking about working within tight budget restrictions and not complaining but instead using it as a challenge to make a better show was refreshing.
And then there was the cast. After the disappointment of the pretty people of Gossip Girl, I wasn’t expecting much from this beautiful trio. Again, I was wrong to doubt. Ian Somerhalder is as funny and charming as he is gorgeous, Paul Wesley as well, and Nina Dobrev was their straight man and long suffering little sister. They told stories, and you could tell that these were people who enjoy each others’ company. They talked about calling the writers when they had questions about how to play their characters, and there was clearly much mutual respect between the two camps. There was a neat tangent when they started talking about the vampire makeup and ended up talking about how the makeup and especially the teeth change their behavior and attitude. Somerhalder talked of enjoying scaring people on set, even when he wasn’t in a scene. And Wesley and Somerhalder were very good natured about doing scenes shirtless. Williamson said they’re actually trying to keep Wesley’s shirt on in more scenes, so as not to be gratuitous, which was greeted by boo’s from the audience. He gave us two thumbs up and said he agreed with us. Since Sawyer doesn’t take his shirt off on Lost anymore, we’re having to go elsewhere for eye candy. From having seen this week’s episode with Somerhalder shirtless, I highly suggest tuning in.
Before the panel, they showed us the episode that will be showing this week, a brand new one that hasn’t aired yet. I think it was the Veronica Mars panel where they did the same thing. Both times, it was such a different experience to watch a TV show with a theater full of people. It feels so communal, with everyone laughing, gasping, squealing, at the same time. That last would be when Somerhalder appeared shirtless, the crowd went wild. It’s not like watching a movie, because people are more willing to interact with the program. And because these are characters we’ve been watching in our homes for an hour every week so we feel we know them. Plus, these are people who love these shows, who have stood in line in the rain to get in, have flown across the country or even across the world to be there. It’s a theater full of people with a common passion, and there’s an energy from that.
After a good Paley Fest panel, I come out knowing that, however hard it may be, I do want to be writing for TV, to create characters and stories that can move people like that, cause that kind of devotion. I still don’t have the map to Oz, but I know there’s a great reward waiting if I can find my way.
My Teen Angst Bullshit Has a Bodycount
I am surrounded these days with ads for the new TV version of Parenthood. I liked the movie, and given my demographic, I should be excited about it. Yeah, I won’t be watching. I’m counting down the days until Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries come back, wondering if The N will start showing new episodes of Degrassi anytime soon. As many times as people tell me that The Wire is the best television show ever made, I’ll likely never watch it. I did watch a few weeks of the new 90210, until it made me want to shove a knitting needle in my ear and perform a self lobotomy.
I didn’t have the perfect high school experience, with school dances, crushes on football players and pep rallies. I was in a Gifted & Talented program located at an inner city school, so I was in a little geek bubble in classes, and then released into a world of peeling paint and fences with razor wire on top. I wouldn’t change a thing about it, but it’s driven home to me how weird it was whenever I talk about it to friends. It was my normal, but it’s far from it. Of course, I was also awkward and trying to find myself and define myself. I do need both hands to count the number of dates I had, but only barely. I was on the verge of asking a friend’s ex-boyfriend to go to senior prom with me when someone whose date had dumped him after they made prom plans asked me. I accepted, and heard the words every girl longs to hear, “Thank God someone finally said yes.” Night of wonder and romance it wasn’t, but my dress was amazing. Being too smart for my own good, and for most teenage boys, I ended up with a bitter snarky streak a mile wide. I aspired to be Dorothy Parker, not homecoming queen.
I think that’s why I like to indulge my inner 12 year old and lose myself in teen dramas on TV. For an hour, I can connect with that perfect teen experience, be a rich prep school girl on the upper east side, or a girl from a small town torn between her safe old boyfriend and a dangerous stranger. Or even a girl about to graduate from college, wondering if she’ll be able to have the future she’s dreaming of and keep her slacker boyfriend. I can revisit past choices, try different decisions, without torturing myself about all the mistakes I’ve made. That’s saved for middle of the night insomnia. No, watching these shows allows me to relive those times and turn it off with no after effects when an hour has passed.
Some shows are better than others. Just thinking about My So-Called Life brings up emotions almost as strong as those about my own experiences. Angela Chase was every confused teenage girl who lived in her head too much and felt too deeply. Except she had Jordan Catalano. And that was part of the appeal, the real Jordans of high school would never have noticed the Angelas, but through the show we got to see what it would have been like if he had. Oh, the scene when he takes her hand in the hallway, acknowledging they’re together. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.
Degrassi is nowhere near that level. It’s half an hour of Canadian teen soap opera. As the tagline says, “It Goes There.” The shit that has gone down at that school would have most parents clamoring for a new principal and oversight board. A school shooting, teen pregnancies, rapes, drug abuse, various STD’s. It’s a hot mess, and I eat it up like junk food. From a public health standpoint, the show does a better job of educating viewers about issues without stooping to the “Very Special Blossom,” level of most American shows. Except for the character who developed, and recovered from, a meth addiction over the course of three episodes. The episode where a 14 year old character got pregnant and chose to have an abortion wasn’t aired in the US for over a year after its Canadian debut. The acting isn’t great, and they are really struggling with what to do with the original characters as they’ve aged out of the high school. It’s my secret shame.
The WB used to be a bastion of great teen shows, the CW a bit less. But the new show Life Unexpected is like somehow having the WB back. The characters are complicated, the writing is sharp, and the plots are realistically messy. No one on this show is a real grown up- the teenager is often more mature than her parents. But it’s not cloying, it rings true. Being raised in foster care would make Lux grow up fast, and Cate and Baze are privileged enough to have kept one foot in Neverland. Lux’s high school storylines are paralleled with her parents’, showing that while we may leave high school, we’re always haunted by our teenage selves. This is the “family” drama I’ll be watching, the one where no one knows what they’re doing or how to be who they’re supposed to be.
Why True Blood Is My Hate Fuck
When I first heard about True Blood, I was so excited. A new show from Alan Ball, the man behind Six Feet Under and American Beauty? Hell yeah! I was a little nervous about it being set in my home state of Louisiana, because they would be sure to get at least the accents wrong. There was time between hearing about the show and its debut, so I figured I’d read the books. “Read” would be an understatement- I tore through them, devoured them. They’re not high literature, far from it. But they’re fun, the stories are engaging, and Sookie Stackhouse is a tough little heroine. Charlaine Harris lives in Arkansas, so she knows the culture of small town north Louisiana and it comes across in the books. Yes, there’s some racism and homophobia in her characters. Folks, that’s the area David Duke came from, it’s a little backwards to say the least. She makes it clear Sookie thinks such things are wrong, and leaving it out would make the books less authentic to the area they’re set in. And there’s development in the attitudes of the people of Bon Temps over the course of the books. Oh, and there’s the character of Eric, the vampire Viking god, and the wonders of book four. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it, but it is my favorite of the series.
I was excited when I saw parts of the pilot were available online. I clicked on, started watching, and quickly made the noise cats make when hacking up a hairball. It was nothing like I had imagined it in my head, and they’d made Sookie’s friend Tara African American, and a bar maid at Merlottes. Now, in southern Louisiana, interracial friendships are somewhat common. Not so much in northern Louisiana. There’s a whole thread in the books about a white male cop and his black female partner and the tension it causes. (By the latest book they’re dating- see? Development.) It was so awful I just forgot about watching it, stuck to the books and the version of the show I’d imagined in my head, and canceled HBO.
I got HBO back for a new season of Big Love, and went ahead and killed time watching the first season of True Blood on demand, figuring it would be good for a laugh. The accents were all over the place, the recast Tara was just as awful as the first if not more so, and there were all kinds of things that annoyed me. I watched two or three a night, hating myself the whole time, but needing more. It made me feel cheap and dirty to be enjoying it at all. So I watched more.
The first season stuck to the plot of the first book pretty closely, changing things to make it more an ensemble than the first person narrative the book was. Jason’s a minor character in the books, as is Tara really. I liked how they expanded Jason’s role, and how they reduced his clothing. The actor playing him does a great job- I knew guys like him growing up. And his accent is amazing for an Aussie. Tara is just terrible in every way. I graduated from an inner city high school in southern Louisiana, and knew plenty of strong black women in my time living there. She is nothing like those wonderful women. No spark, no fire, and she wouldn’t scare a bug. Those women? Put the fear of god in you with one look. I love those women, there’s a style to them that isn’t a stereotype but that you would recognize a mile off. The show is poorer without them.
I knew the vampires would be used as a metaphor for homosexuals in this country, even though I always felt the books didn’t. If anything, there were more parallels between the development of rights for African Americans and the rights of vampires. There was a great show in the 80′s set in New Orleans called Frank’s Place, that got the culture of the city right, and tackled even the racial issues within the black community. I’d hoped True Blood would be like that, but I also hope I’ll find a pony in my yard and that hasn’t happened either.
Personally, I would have veered from the books, keeping the characters and coming up with new plot lines each season. But Ball again stuck to the major Dallas plot of the second book, pumping up a minor maenad plot to give the folks back in Bon Temps something to do. I doubt anyone would have missed the black eyed orgies that gave us. It is good to still have Lafayette around, as he was killed in the book and the solving of his murder was a “B” story. Quick aside, no one, but no one, says it like they do on the show. It’s LAF-ee-ette, not Laf-I-ette. They might as well have people say Pee-can. Anyway, Bill’s maker didn’t show up in book two, there’s no Jessica, the queen isn’t in it and she isn’t like that when she does show up. And Jason has nothing to do with the Fellowship of the Sun. They’re minor quibbles, but avoidable if Ball had veered from the books. They have fans, but not as many or as rabid as Twilight or even Watchmen. Taking the characters and the world and writing new stories would have been accepted, because the fans would still have the books. By sticking so close to the books, Ball is setting up the assumption that he will continue to do so, but then he’s turning around and saying things that lead us to think he’s planning a major, major change.
Stop reading here if you don’t want spoilers on either. See, in the books, Sookie ends up with Eric (at least as far as the series is now), and Bill slips into the background for several books after book three. He’s a bit insipid, and Eric is the more entertaining character, so I never minded. Bill always felt Sookie needed saving, Eric thought she sometimes would appreciate help. And they share a sense of humor. I kept watching the show, even when I wanted to throw things at the TV, because of the characters different from the books, Jason, Jessica and Hoyt. But in large part, I watched for Eric, even the small glimpses of him in the first season, and the even smaller glimpses of Pam (I love Pam, book and show, she’s a hoot). Yes, the sheer physical perfection of ASkars does help, and lesser casting would have made me give up sooner. In the books he’s described as, well, sheer physical perfection, so I didn’t think they’d be able to find someone for the role. As I doubt I was the only person in the country screaming “Pan left! Pan left!” during Sookie’s dream sex scene with him, I think the casting director of the show deserves an award. Eric’s not the typical “Bad Boy,” he doesn’t need the love of a good woman to save him. He appreciates Sookie for who she is, and likes that she stands up to him. He’s not perfect, but he’s not watching her secretly in her sleep, hiding his mad first wife in the attic, or marrying someone else just to spite her. As romantic heroes go he’s pretty progressive.
So it irks me no end that Alan Ball is reportedly Team Bill all the way, and has said things that can lead to thoughts that he’ll continue to stick to the books except where the story of Bill and Sookie is concerned. He’s already messed with the character of Eric, and given plot points that were supposed to show him in a favorable light to Bill, but if he changes the whole arc of the story to make his fantasy stay true, I won’t be able to get past the bad accents and cultural mistakes any longer. Probably. Maybe. I think. I know I’ll hate myself even more.
