Thanks to Alan Ball for impulse buying and for being an openly gay man, or we wouldn’t have the True Blood we love so much.

Based on the ‘Sookie Stackhouse’ books by American novelist Charlaine Harris, writer/producer Alan Ball’s True Blood is one of the most compelling and entertaining takes on the vampire legend around. But, as he tells MCV, the television program would never have been made had he not accidentally stumbled upon the first book in Harris’s series.

“It was a total impulse buy for me, this book, and I started reading it and I could not put it down. It was like crack! It was like I was addicted to it. And somewhere around book three or four [in the series] I thought, this is so not the sort of stuff I usually read but I love this world and these characters, and I think this would make a great TV show.”

Like much of Ball’s work, True Blood is gay inclusive: hardly a surprise given that he’s an openly and proudly gay man – which isn’t to say that his sexuality has never been an issue.

“I came from New York, where almost everyone is gay and everyone is politically correct, so my first job in LA was working on a sit-com, and in a sit-com writers’ room everyone is fair game. Everyone. Women, straight men, white people, gays. And those writers can be a little shocking! Words that we’re not supposed to use get used, and I was briefly like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do? These people are telling fag jokes, what the fuck am I going to do?’

“But after I did come out, it’s never been an issue. I remember with American Beauty, they said ‘Are you okay doing interviews with the gay press?’ and I was like yeah, why wouldn’t I be? And from then I just don’t even think about it.”

What Ball does have to think about it the sometimes difficult process of adapting Harris’s books for television.

“The biggest challenge for us was that Charlaine’s books are all narrated by Sookie; they basically are Sookie’s story. And if I had done that with the show Anna Paquin [who plays Sookie] would be working 12 hours a day five days a week, and she’d end up in the hospital,” he laughs.

“So what we did as a writing staff was to try to take all these peripheral characters in the books and give them their own story, so that instead of it being just one story it’s actually a world, you know, where you have five, or at this point six or seven major characters, each with their own story.”

One such character is gay cook and construction worker Lafayette Reynolds, played by Nelsan Ellis, who was killed off relatively early in the Sookie Stackhouse series, but who is still very much alive in True Blood.

“I knew the first day that we started shooting with Nelsan and he was improvising, I knew immediately this guy’s gold and I can’t kill him. He’s such a great character that we’ve got to figure out a way for him not to die.”

So what are his plans for series three, which is currently in development?

“We’ve worked out a general direction for the season, and we’ve sketched out the first four episodes and I’ve assigned writers and they’re off writing the scripts. As to what will happen, I can confirm the rumours you may have heard about werewolves and the gay vampire king of Mississippi. And Lafayette will get a boyfriend.”

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Posted in Alan Ball, Charlaine Harris, Nelsan Ellis, Season 3