My review of True Blood: The Complete First Season is online at FilmFreakCentral.net.

There’s something refreshing about True Blood, a show that approaches the idea of loving the undead with healthy helpings of humour, viscera, eroticism, and subtext. The tongue-in-cheek storytelling and routinely bloody tableaux aren’t especially remarkable, but True Blood is pretty packed with sex, even by HBO’s standards. Over the course of True Blood‘s first 12 episodes, we learn that Bon Temps, Louisiana, and environs are home to not just a handsome Civil War vampire but also a plucky telepathic waitress and a shapechanging bartender, as well as assorted “fangbangers” (humans with a thing for screwing vampires) and addicts in thrall to V juice, the street term underscoring the intoxicating, potency-enhancing effects vampires’ blood has on humans.