True Blood is the leather-clad, rutting S&M fetishist to Twilight's vanilla conservative. The Grace Jones to The Vampire Diaries' Taylor Swift. Sweet little Southern diner waitresses run around having sex with werewolves and yelling expletives (hearing “fuck off you fagbasher!” in a Louisiana accent is absolutely brilliant), men in tight jeans get tied up and beaten in meth labs, and that big blonde Viking adonis from Lady Gaga's Paparazzi video broods a lot and sticks his metaphorical stake in various members of the cast, regardless of species or gender. All sounds a bit like urban Northern Europe on a Saturday night. Our favourite character is vampire queen Sophie-Ann, who lives in an art nouveau mansion, sucking the blood out of the occasional pizza delivery boy and using it to make Cosmopolitans.
Apparently, perhaps concerningly, it’s all supposed to be a metaphor for LGBT rights. When vampires reveal themselves it’s dubbed “coming out of the coffin”. The first series dealt partly with the legalisation of vampire marriage in America. There’s even a “god hates fangs” church. A work of gay Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, True Blood has enjoyed unprecedented success in America, so much so that it returns for a fourth season later this month.
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