Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer & Alan Ball
Gabriel Wilder (of the Sydney Morning Herald) spoke with Alan Ball recently about True Blood and other projects he’s working on.
Alan Ball’s vampire series True Blood has almost single-handedly pulled the premium US cable channel HBO out of a slump.
The network was having a fallow period after its glory days when The Sopranos and Sex and the City regularly reaped Emmys and pulled viewers in their millions. Then along came Ball, who had won an Oscar for his script for the film American Beauty and created another Emmy-winning series for HBO, Six Feet Under, with the idea of a series based on Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels.
”When I read the books I got sort of addicted to the story,” he says. ”Charlaine created this world that is constantly surprising and funny and terrifying and sometimes really heartbreaking, and I thought it would be a television show I would watch – that’s really all I can do.”
It turns out viewers like what Ball likes: ratings increased steadily during the first season; by the end of the second it had become HBO’s most popular series since The Sopranos.
It’s a long way from the middle-class angst of American Beauty and the sombre meditations on life and death in Six Feet Under. And there’s a good reason for that.
”Years of peering into that existential abyss can bring you down a little bit. Granted I did five seasons of Six Feet Under; I’ve only done two seasons of True Blood. But this is just more fun, in terms of a childlike of enjoyment of the job, and the places we get to go as storytellers and the things we get to do.”
The show is set in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps and centres on the telepathic waitress Sookie (Anna Paquin). She is not the only supernatural being in town: there are shapeshifters and a maenad, and season three will have werewolves. But most visible are the vampires, who have ”come out of the coffin” and are living openly – thanks to a synthetic blood – and campaigning for equal rights. This sets the stage not just for romance and horror but also some sharp social satire. This, and Ball’s earthy approach, set True Blood apart from other tales in the genre.
Read the entire article here.
I actually missed this article ! Will have to find it. Nice to have photos as well on the second page.