Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Hype O-Negative


The news that Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball plans to make some additional dips into the horror genre is probably very, very exciting to all horror and Alan Ball fans, if by "all horror and Alan Ball fans" you mean horror or Alan Ball fans who haven't actually seen his first fright effort, True Blood; purportedly a dramedic series about vampires living among humans, but really just a means of upping the number of crappy southern accents on cable television.

Like a lot of HBO series, this is probably one of those shows that's intentionally inaccessible and unrewarding to viewers at its outset in order to generate cult cred and a second-season stride, which might be a good strategy if it didn't require people to even consider that Anna Paquin might one day be tolerable. In daring such an assumption, HBO makes an ass of you and umption.

Admittedly, the three minutes of the show I was able to stand before severing the power cord from my television and shoving it into all of the orifices I use for breathing probably wasn't enough to accurately convey how the series will ultimately shape up, but if an Emmy nominee and Oscar-winner can't make vampires interesting in three minutes, maybe he dug up the wrong idea.

1 comments :

  1. Anonymous said...

    I'm watching the pilot online right now, and it stopped to buffer so I probably got about as much of it under my belt as you did. I saw the opening scene with the convenience store vampire (pure shit); the first scene with Anna Paquin at the diner (shit with little bits of corn in it); and the inexplicable scene with the black chick and the fat chick at the hardware store (bloody diarrhea). I know from reviews that the black chick is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but thus far she seems like a nasty cunt.

    This crap is supposed to be entertainment? WTF? Vampires and Alan Ball and HBO seemed like a surefire combination. This is really, really bad.

    Oh, and you're totally right about the southern accents. My mother's from North Carolina by way of Louisiana, and a real southern accent is the aural version of sugar melting in your mouth. These accents are like packets of Sweet N Low fused together at the bottom of an old lady's purse.