True Blood

See, the truth is that vampires are a bit shit. No, really, they are. They are the sort of horror adversaries that are favoured by feckless, emo kids. Whereas a zombie will bite your face off and a werewolf will undergo a radical change then bite your face off, a vampire will look ashen-faced, forlorn and them bite you as some sort of inadequate substitute for good, old fashioned humping.

And this goes right back to Dracula - the one of the first and the most famous of vampire stories. For much of the novel, the "action" centres on forlorn Victorian types chasitely lusting after each other, with Dracula in the background adhering to the cliche of the rapey foreigner. It is telling that the most effective episodes in the novel - the voyage of the Demeter and the Bloofer Lady - both contain nothing of the main human characters of the novel and only oblique references to Dracula. Compare Dracula to Frankenstein - the latter has a compelling, demented and terrifying monster. Dracula sadly lacks that, and ends up being a collection of letters pertaining to a crappy antagonist.

This, I believe, is why the more successful vampire stories make it clear that their bloodsuckers are proper monsters. Take Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot - to my mind, the most successful vampire tale of all time. The vampires are set up to be utterly inhuman - or, to quote the text, "unspeakable" - long before they properly turn up in the story through the murder of the child. And Let The Right One In has a vampire who is a predatory, manipulative sociopath whose gender is unknown (at least in the film version), but used to manipulate those it wishes to work with. It is a being of such power that it can make one of it's servants drink acid - and is preying on a teenage boy. These are real monsters, and they are a long way from Dracula.

Of course, the vampires in True Blood are neither the gothic Dracula, nor the plague-esque monsters that came to 'Salem's Lot, or the emos of the Twilight series. They aren't that interesting. In fact, they are just pretty shit. They are crudely drawn "alternative" types, with nothing genuinely interesting or unique about them. The vampire "hero" looks like an aging, Boy Band reject whose main reason for winning this starring role seems to be his constant ability to look meaningful and moody in the general direction of the camera. And he's the best of them - the best of a very bad (as in crap, rather than evil) bunch.

But then again, that's fair enough, given the human characters (or at least the humans and the human/dog shapeshifty thing) are beyond bland too. They drink, they take drugs, they fuck, they argue - all without ever being interesting. They never really come across as real - which is a bit of a problem, given the basic series needs something to ground it in reality. Actually, scratch that. They need someone to make it interesting. Which, sadly, neither the humans nor the vampires can do.

The scripts don't help, though. Long and poorly paced, the early episodes of season one feel like weak eighties Doctor Who - elongated padding before someone central gets into trouble. But even as the plot progresses and we learn more about the killings, it still fails to take off. It takes a truly special (and not in the good way) series to make serial killing boring; True Blood is that series.

I have no idea why this programme is so highly acclaimed. While watching it, I turned to my wife and said "I wrote this. When I was thirteen". It got the biggest laugh - and was also the most interesting moment - of that series. True Blood? True bollocks, more like.