An end in sight for Sookie Stackhouse

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 0 Comments

"True Blood" the series

Charlaine Harris has been writing mysteries for decades. For a long time it was a “heavily subsidized hobby.” Then came the Sookie Stackhouse series of adventures set in rural Louisiana involving vampires, shapeshifters and even fairy godmothers. Suddenly she was famous. Now, with the release of her 11th book, Dead Reckoning, comes news that the series will soon end. But not without a lot of super naturals going to their “true death.” The Southern matron,  59,  cackles gleefully at the thought of all the blood she’s about to spill.

Adaptations of her books can be seen on HBO, where Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) has turned them into the massively successful True Blood series starring Anna Paquin and Alexander Skarsgard.

Q: The Sookie books were successful before Alan Ball approached you. You’d even had a few offers to adapt them. Why did you say yes to him?

A: Because he got me. He understood the mixture of comedy, horror and blood and sex that the books comprise. And he convinced me that he understood what I was doing, whereas other people were more into the vampire aspect of it, the violence or the sex scenes—you know there’s not a sex scene in every book, but when I do have a sex scene I like to make it good—they were emphasizing more one thing or the other and I just didn’t think they could bring it to a good resolution, but I knew Alan could.

Q: He’s made quite a lot of changes to your books—for example Vampire Bill is now king of Louisiana. Does he run the changes by you?

A: Why would he? He’s the guy who does TV. He doesn’t call me and suggest future story lines for the books.

Q: When books are adapted for the screen, a lot of writers then say they write for the actors, not the original characters in their heads. Can you separate the two?

A: Umm, I’m so far ahead of Alan and the characters in my head don’t look like the actors, though I’ve noticed a couple of times lately I’ve seen them creeping into the action in the book and I go “Wait a minute, who are we talking about here?” and I change my mental image to my people.

Q: Did you always have the series all figured out?

A: Totally not! (laugh) I didn’t because it took two years to sell the first book; my agent couldn’t find anyone who wanted it. When I finally did sign a contract I didn’t know if I’d ever get to write another one. Well, the first one was successful right out of the gate, which was a surprise to everybody. Penguin wanted more books and I signed a contract and I thought “Well, maybe I’ll get to write three more.” I’d never written a series that ran that long.

Q: In the books, there are vampires, then shapeshifters, werewolves, fairies and elves—as Bill says “I haven’t seen an elf in 100 years.” After a while do you not run out of super naturals?

A: I’m always trying to find something I haven’t used before that will keep me entertained to write about. I seriously doubt I’ll be introducing any new species in the remaining two books because I’m in the wrapping up process, not the expansion process.

Q: The last few books have been novels or adventures. Is lessening the mystery aspect a key part of the series’ success?

A: If I knew why they are so successful I would have done it a long time ago! The first books were really mystery-based because I come from mystery and that was really all I knew how to do, so I was going to include a murder mystery with each book. And also I wanted to bring all 10 of my mystery readers with me to this new adventure. Then the books got so big and complicated it felt artificial to stick a mystery construction on them. They were obviously adventures. I thought it was probably right for me to return to my original roots for the last two books.

Q: When you realized you were going to end with book 13, did you then start mapping it out?

A: With the last book I wrote, Dead Reckoning, I thought “I think I’m going to call it quits” so that means I have to decide with Dead Reckoning that I’m going to tie it up because I have to start heading towards the goal line. I have to start tying up threads and planning how to bring the book to the conclusion I had planned.

Q: What can you say about the next book?

A: I’m deep at work on book 12 and of course there are going to be developments with Eric’s unfortunate situation, which is all I can think of to call it. [The 1,000-year-old vampire has been given to the queen of Arkansas] But a lot of the next book is a murder mystery going back to the roots of the books. And the terrible predicament the fairies are in.

Q: Does Sookie get to live happily ever after?

A: Won’t you be glad to find out? Everyone has a different idea of what happily ever after means. Sookie wants to be self sufficient, independent, she wants to have enough money to live on, she wants to be surrounded by the people she loves, she doesn’t want to get beaten up anymore and I think she’d be very happy to find someone to spend her life with because she’s a romantic girl.

Q: In May you became the fourth author to sell over a million e-books on Amazon’s Kindle. What’s the impact for you?

A: All my other works are back in print and being read more than when they were originally published. People say “oh these are so good” and I say “yeah, they were good 30 years ago too” (laughing). I didn’t make much money but I kept getting published. My husband referred to it as a “heavily subsidized hobby.”

Q: What does the e-book mean to other authors?

A: It gives writers who haven’t been successful in traditional publishing a chance to try their hand to try their hand in another format. I think that way you can find out if you really were put-upon all those years or if you’re a crappy writer.

Q: What format do you use to read books?

A: When I’m travelling I have an e-book reader. I got a Nook [from Barnes & Noble] and got my husband a Kindle so we could compare. I travel so much it seemed like a good idea. I can’t go somewhere without reading. At home I read real books, and that’s the nice thing—(in a whisper) people send me books all the time, it’s just like Christmas! I get them for free. Free books!

When I started making money the first thing I did was tell my husband “I’m going to buy any book I want.” I’m not going to wait for the library, I’m not going to wait until someone loans it to me. I’m going to buy any f—ing book I want to buy. And that has been the most fun.

Q: Going back to the end of the Sookie Stackhouse series, it’s often the case that wrap ups involve a lot of blood, isn’t it?

A: I do like wholesale slaughter. I love writing death scenes so it’s going to be happy days for me! Sometimes I kill people off and resurrect them just for the fun of writing the scene! That’s why I’m so cheerful. You’ve never met jollier people than horror writers. They are hysterical. I’m happy.

‘True Blood’ won’t admit it’s a soap?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

At last, a post with no mention of Daniel Hugh Kelly (except that one). True Blood‘s season finale didn’t seem to please a lot of people — well, online, anyway; it got lots of viewers, though not nearly as many as The Closer or Rizzoli & Isles, and some of them must have been happy with it. This post by Erika at Seriality sums up a lot of the problems that fans have been having with the show, particularly the fact that it’s splintered into so many different storylines that none of them seem to be satisfying.

Now, as I said, I suspect many True Blood viewers don’t have a problem with this, and again, this comes back to the soap-opera format. True Blood didn’t start out intending to be a prime-time soap opera, but that’s what it is. Like many soap operas, it started with a relatively narrow focus — in this case, the focus provided by the books’ first-person narration — and grew from there, giving more characters their own storylines, and having more stories that aren’t clearly connected to the nominal main story. (It’s a key feature of many soap operas that by the time it’s been on for a few years, you can’t even remember who the main characters were originally supposed to be.) And the stories play out in little blocks, one after the other.

As I said earlier, this has a lot in common with the storytelling on regular serialized shows, particularly on HBO. But there are differences too, and True Blood may not have completely figured out how to deal with them. With a serial drama, the season finale is usually expected to wrap stuff up to a certain extent. Not that everything is resolved, but just that you can watch the season and see that there has been a story that played out from beginning to end over the course of those 13-24 episodes. (24 is the ultimate example, of course.) Soaps aren’t like that. Hardly anything ever gets resolved, and when something does get resolved, it’s almost thrown away in the rush to introduce a new unresolved plot point. As this point, True Blood has no real central character and no real endgame except to keep us in suspense, which means it’s going to look bad if evaluated the way we evaluate, say, a season of The Sopranos.

But also, Jeremy Mongeau said something to the effect that True Blood hasn’t fully embraced its identity as a soap opera, and that the finale didn’t work even by prime-time soap standards. And there’s something to that as well. It’s possible to do a soap finale that satisfies the audience. Dallas practically invented the concept of the season finale as a big deal (the last episode of the season was no big deal at all for much of TV history), and when that show was at its best, it would leave every plot line hanging while still making the audience feel as if the finale wasn’t just a random episode. They, and other prime-time soaps, did it by sending everything to the next level in the season finale; the most famous example is “Who Shot J.R.?” where many of the plot points become so heightened that everybody is given a reason not just to hate J.R. but to shoot him. True Blood does not have that ability, at least this season, to raise the stakes that high in the season finale, perhaps because the show is always operating at fever pitch, trying to create maximum levels of campy melodrama at every possible moment. It’s like they really couldn’t make the season finale’s mayhem seem any more mayhem-ish than the rest of the season.

Also, shooting somebody works better as a cliffhanger than anything involving fairies.

The Emmys: Accent on Youth

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 11:01 PM - 0 Comments

It’s frivolous and pointless to try and impose a theme on a whole night of awards, but everybody does it, and the theme of this year’s Emmys seemed to be “New blood.” (As opposed to True Blood, which didn’t win much. Luckily for HBO, they proved once again that their real domination is in the field of miniseries and TV movies, where they brought home all the Emmys that they lost in the continuing series categories.) There were some old-guard shows and performers that won: Bryan Cranston kept up his basically well-deserved streak, while Edie Falco won best actress in a comedy because her show isn’t a comedy (as she herself pretty much admitted) and the voters can’t resist the chance to vote for Real Acting in that category. Plus the Best Actress in a drama category didn’t have any non-veterans except January Jones, and few people were upset that she didn’t win. And Mad Men won again because, as I said, it hits the Emmy voter sweet spot — but how strange is it that it’s dominated to this extent while never winning an acting award?

But many of the winners were newish. The biggest surprises of the night were in the drama supporting categories, where two relatively unfamiliar performers beat out a number of more familiar competitors. Aaron Paul, who won for Breaking Bad, is the archetypal young Hollywood journeyman who has been acting in TV in small parts since he was 19 years old, and became a fine actor without hardly anybody noticing until it became unavoidable. And Archie Panjabi, the biggest surprise by far (as well as the only hint of ethnic diversity in the acting awards), was not the youngest person in her category but is a relative newcomer to Hollywood. I sometimes wonder if this might be a case of two other young performers — Moss and Hendricks from Mad Men — splitting the vote for their show, allowing Panjabi to get a prize for a show that is much admired in the business, particularly among older voters. But since most of the other winners were for showy parts, it’s good to have one winner who had to make an impact with mostly non-showy material (and made much more out of her character than might have been expected).

Jim Parsons, obviously, is an example of the young guy making good (and, like Jane Lynch winning for Glee, allowed the Academy to recognize a phenomenon without giving it many other prizes). And Modern Family, whatever my reservations about it and its sledgehammer moralizing, is a new show that took lots of awards including the big one,  and the narrative before the show was based on the question of whether it would win or if another freshman show would take it.

There was a feeling for much of night, but reaching its peak with those supporting prizes, that there was a reaction against the relative predictability and familiarity of the last couple of years’ winners. And in general, the show — at least those parts of the show not involving Jewel — felt looser and less button-down than usual; the banter between the presenters was mostly bad as usual, but Fallon once again demonstrated that he’s become a pretty decent host by more or less embracing the fact that he’s not all that funny. However, the first part of the show felt much more entertaining and fast-paced than the second, because the awards in the second half (loading all the HBO mini and movie awards into it, for example) caused the pace to sag.

Fangs down, ‘True Blood’ is the trashiest show on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 19 Comments

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

A decade ago, HBO was touting its willingness to make something different from the escapist soapy programming on the broadcast networks. Now its biggest hit is True Blood, an escapist, soapy, and sometimes campy show about vampires in the U.S. South, full of bad accents, severed limbs, and lines like “you were fighting the Nazi werewolves.”

Continue…

Why Does Everyone Love Vampires?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, September 14, 2009 at 5:15 PM - 9 Comments

This is a question that’s been going around for a while, what with the smash success of some vampire-related franchises that aren’t all that good: Twilight and TV’s True Blood, whose season finale last night was yet another sign that Alan Ball will never live up to the early promise of Oh, Grow Up. When you factor in guys like Joss Whedon whose only mainstream successes have been with shows that starred vampires or featured the word “vampire” in the title, you have to wonder: why is it that anything with vampires in it is a hit? (Update: Yes, that’s hyperbole. But hyperbole is no excuse for inaccuracy; there are lots of non-hits with vampires.)

Everyone has their answer to that question, so here’s my attempt: vampires have the kind of cross-gender appeal that is valuable to producers and especially valuable in television. Monster stories are considered to be primarily a boy thing. Brooding romance stories, or sex-drenched soap operas (True Blood fits into the latter category) are considered to be primarily a girl thing. A vampire story offers a soapy or romantic tale, but with monsters and violence. That brings in men and women. (Okay, I don’t know how many men went to see the Twilight movies, but I’m going to guess that it wasn’t fewer than would have gone to see a similar story without vampires.) It also appeals to writer/creators because it allows them to use the organizing principle of science fiction — tell fantasy stories that are clearly about our own world and our own time — but reach a broader audience than metaphor-heavy science fiction usually appeals to. True Blood is trying to do metaphorical social commentary, just like Battlestar Galactica did, but because it’s about vampires rather than space travelers, it doesn’t have to be pigeonholed as a “geek” show.

And of course vampires are appealing because of the wish-fulfilment aspect. That’s familiar enough, the idea that there’s something cool about being a vampire: you get eternal youth and beauty, and you get to keep most of the outward trappings of humanity. (Werewolves may have a certain wish-fulfilment element, based on our longing to be tough and primal, but werewolves don’t get to be pretty and they don’t get girls. Not usually, anyway.) Even the vampires who don’t live in cool castles like Dracula are kind of like the idle rich, people who live by different rules, have exotic appetites, and can do unusual things. And yet, unlike witches, they don’t have so many powers that writing for them becomes impossible. They’re magical enough to be cool, not magical enough to make plotting difficult.

*No, I’m not kidding.

At Least TRUE BLOOD Is Better Than This

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 15, 2009 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

I still can’t work up much interest in True Blood, but if HBO ever wants to do an animated spinoff, they can always work out a deal with their corporate cousin Hanna-Barbera and remake this somewhat similar story:

An alternative title for this post was “title sequences with way too much narration.” There seemed to be a wave of cartoons in the ’70s and early ’80s where the opening sequence was all narration, no song.