Word: hbo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like most HBO series, vampire drama True Blood (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.) has a fantastic title sequence. To the tune of Jace Everett's dark country single Bad Things, images of death, lust and religious frenzy flash by. A woman writhes in black lingerie ... a preacher lays on hands ... a Venus flytrap snaps shut on a frog. It's a fever dream of Eros wrestling Thanatos in the middle of a tent revival. Damn! I think. I want to see the show those titles...
...tasty. But Ball's characters, living and dead, are caricatures. He once said the only meddling HBO ever did on SFU was to ask him to make it less conventional, and he could have used that kind of intervention this time. For a show about prejudice, True Blood is free with stereotypes: Sookie's sassy black friend, the flaming gay cook and sundry racist Juh-hee-sus-fearing rednecks. (When a boy sees Bill and tells his mother, "He's so white!" she answers, "No, darlin', we're white. He's dayd...
True Blood makes little effort to rethink genre conventions, as HBO did with shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood. The vampires have spooky eyes and fangs that click into place. When Sookie reads people's minds, they speak in complete sentences. This last is a mechanical failure (that's not how people think, just how we're used to hearing it on TV) and an artistic one. In HBO's great dramas, unlike most TV, the characters don't tell you exactly what they're thinking. Was the world dying for an HBO show with no subtext? Take away...
Entourage The Complete Fourth Season; out Aug. 26 Movie idol Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) hits a career speed bump, and so does this HBO comedy. While Vince and his bros await the editing of his epic flick Medellín, the show dithers and seems bored with itself. Here's hoping the upcoming season gives them better material...
TELEVISION The Black List HBO; Aug. 25; 9 p.m. E.T. This spare film collects 22 black celebrities' insights as told to critic Elvis Mitchell--from Toni Morrison (left) on how her race liberated her as a writer to Chris Rock on his dad's theory about competing with white people: "If you have six and the white guy has five, he wins...