True Blood News - Season 4 news and spoilers

Cinemax has ordered the “True Blood” creator’s latest project, “Banshee,” to series, and tapped a director for the maiden episode.

The series will center on an ex-con who arrives in a tiny town in Pennsylvania Amish country and poses as a murdered sheriff in order to inflict his own twisted form of justice.

Greg Yaitanes, veteran director of “House M.D.,” “Lost” and “Heroes,”‘ will sit behind the camera for the first episode.

source

Banshee will start shooting this spring in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, where Showtime’s Homeland is also filmed.

source for filming locations

Congratulations to True Blood creator Alan Ball!  He’s been named by Hollywood Reporter as one of the 50 most powerful showrunners in television.  Long may he reign!

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And for those of you who have been left devastated by the cancellation of stupendous HBO shows like Carnivale and Deadwood, fear not!  The same fate will not befall True Blood.  The AV Club, sister site of The Onion, has published an article speculating that no matter how low a show’s ratings dwindle, HBO is now taking the stance of not cancelling a show until it has come to a logical conclusion.  Not that a show with ratings as healthy as True Blood is in any danger of facing the axe, but it’s nice to be reassured after the trauma of seeing the cliffhanger at the end of Carnivale that will never be resolved!  And since True Blood is such a cash cow for HBO,  perhaps the fans of other, less successful shows on HBO have the vampires to thank for their show’s survival?

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Without a doubt, this will be a busy year for Alan. Not only he is supposed to be taking care of our fav vampires, but Ball is now also set to executive produce HBO’s hour-long medical drama entitled  Wichita,  about a Kansas abortion doctor caught at the nexus of a political, cultural and ethical conflict. The project is based on the life of Dr. George Tiller.

Wichita marks Ball’s third project with the premium cable network behind True Blood. He also is set to executive produce HBO sibling Cinemax’s Banshee, a project set in Pennsylvania’s Amish country that revolves around an ex-con and martial arts expert who poses as the small town’s murdered sheriff as he enforces his own brand of justice and uses the position to serve his own interest.

source: hollywoodreporter.com

In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald,  Alan Ball praises Ryan Kwanten, whom he cast for True Blood after seeing him in a movie called Flicka, a family movie about a brother and sister and a horse, where Ryan was the handsome, charming, not-so-intellectually developed brother. He also talks about his experiences with Death (a recurrent topic in Alan’s interviews as the “naked” is to our guys) and how he doesn’t understand the life without suffering.  We don’t either, Alan. Why do we need to wait one whole year for a new season? ;)

How do you explain the popularity of vampires?

Somebody asked me, ”Why do people like vampires so much?” This was right after Obama had been elected and I said, ”Because we just spent eight years being sucked dry by one.”

Were you surprised Six Feet Under ever got off the ground?

Before Six Feet Under premiered, HBO was concerned the show was very dark. Everybody would say the family in Six Feet Under is so dysfunctional. OK, but who’s abusing who? Who’s the crazy alcoholic abusing the mother and molesting the daughter? To me, that’s dysfunction. But I guess in America we’re so sold on this ideal of the perfect, well-adjusted family that is able to confront any conflict and, with true love and understanding, work things through. I’m sure they do exist but I never knew any of them. It wasn’t my idea to do a show about a family in a funeral home. That came from Carolyn Strauss at HBO. When she pitched it to me I thought, ”I’ve never seen that.” That was about 10 years ago and I’d certainly had enough experiences with death in my life with my family and being a member of the gay community, where people died very young.

Your older sister died in a car crash when you were 13. How did that affect your family?

All of a sudden my family’s entire life started to centre around a very Gothic, grief-centred religion. My mum got into the whole school of thought that we were living in the end of times and the rapture was coming. It was not really helpful to anybody; it was not helping us process the grief. It seemed to be a sort of latching on to some weird obsessive mythology in a way to avoid actually going through the grief itself.

But you turned to Buddhism?

Life is suffering. We have desires and expectations and egos and we compare the reality we have, which is miraculous and wondrous, with this reality we desire. That somehow distances us from actually taking part fully with the reality we do have and that creates suffering. For me, the thing that I love is that it’s all about the present moment. It’s not about processing something that happened 20 years ago over and over and over again, and still carrying it with you, or not living today because you’ve put all your eggs in one basket for these goals down the road that may never happen.

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Is Tara dead? "How can she be NOT dead?" asks creator Alan Ball

Writer Raelle Tucker and Executive producer Alan Ball talk to TV Guide about True Blood’s Season 4 finale and some hints about what will be happening in Bon Temps in Season 5.

Will Tara (Rutina Wesley) Survive? “I can’t say whether she will be back in her present form, but we’ll continue to tell Tara’s story,” says Tucker.

Are Bill (Stephen Moyer) and Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) marked men after killing Nan and her guards? “They’ve been fighting witches all season, and now they will have to fight  the power elite of their own kind,” says Ball. Adds Tucker: “For once in their lives they need to rely on and trust each other. They team up to face a common enemy.”

Is Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare) really back? Yes confirms Ball–and with “an interesting new alliance,” teases Tucker.

Will Werewolf Alcide (Joe Manganiello) finally win Sookie’s (Anna Paquin) heart? “They have a deep friendship and chemistry that we’ll continue to explore,” Tucker says. “But Sookie will be trying to stand on her own two feet next season.”

Will ghosts from Terry’s (Todd Lowe) past threaten his wife, Arlene (Carrie Preston)? “The ghosts will come back, and he and Arlene are going to be challenged by that,” Tucker confirms. “Terry’s PTSD comes from a particular incident we’ll learn more about. Scott Foley’s Patrick Devins has a huge part to play.”

What kind of vampire will former fang-hater Steve Newlin (Michael McMillian) be? “He will do what he believes is the righteous thing that God wants him to do, although it will be altered by his new condition,” Tucker says.

Any exciting new characters coming up? “There are a couple of new roles that will be very sexy,” says Ball. One in particular is “a strong, mysterious female at the center of one of our main stories,” Tucker says. “She’s fierce, one of the strongest women we will have seen on the show, a force to be reckoned with.”

Source: TV Guide Magazine, issue dated September 26-October 2, 2011

This weekend here in Melbourne I had the opportunity of hearing Alan Ball speak at an ‘In Conversation’ event put on by the Wheeler Centre, a great venue and organization that is part of the State Library and showcases everything to do with writing and storytelling. As Alan is the creator of two of my favourite TV shows and a successful creative mind whose skill and imagination I greatly admire as a student of writing myself, this was a real treat for me. Alan’s co-converser for the evening was another Alan B, local media personality Alan Brough, who was an enthusiastic and well-researched interviewer.

Mr Ball was relaxed, entertaining and informative throughout the hour that he was onstage as he and Brough discussed his career so far in a chronological fashion, a sizable chunk of course dedicated to True Blood. Alan discussed things like adapting a television series from a book series, what they changed from the books and what they will continue to change, sex, nudity and ‘male eye candy’, the show’s passionate fans and their opinions, and also some very small details of what we may see in season five. Here are some of the main areas Alan covered concerning True Blood.

Adapting the novels to a television series and pre-production process:

-Alan told the story about being early for the dentist and picking up the first book, saying ‘If I believed in fate I would say it was fate. But I don’t.’ While reading the first book he had no plans to develop it as the rights were not yet available, but he was thinking ‘If this was a TV show I would watch it.’

-He gave some insight into the pre-production process for a season, saying it was a new experience doing the process from a source material. On a board they draw twelve columns, one for every episode of the season, and within the columns they have space for each character where they write their ideas and arcs.

-They always have a ‘grand plan’ for the whole season that gets laid out, which usually goes to plan until around the shooting of episode six or seven, then things start to be changed.

-The popularity of DVD box sets has changed the way episodes are written, with each episode now being more like a chapter of a book, which was something Alan wanted to do anyway as he loved how Charlaine’s chapters always end with a shocking moment.

Book to show changes:

-Season Five will start to combine elements from all the books much more than what has been done previously.

-The writers on the show feel liberated getting to create storylines for the other characters that are not Sookie and not having to stick to her point of view like the books.

-Alan discussed a couple of the major changes they made from Book 1 to Season 1. He said the decision to not kill off Lafayette became obvious when he saw Nelsan Ellis work for the first time and he was ‘just channelling from Planet Lafayette.’ He also talked about Bill being the one to stake Longshadow instead of Eric. He says that it made sense for Bill, as Sookie’s lover and protector, to be the one to save her, and also that having to turn a human was an appropriate punishment for a vampire always struggling with his loss of humanity. In the book it was only briefly touched on that Eric would have some kind of trial, and they also got a new character (Jessica) out of the change. Read More »

The Daily Pedestrian was at the Sydney Opera House yesterday where Alan Ball had a dialogue with Wil Anderson. In an article entitled, “Thirteen Things We Learned From Alan Ball At The Opera House,” they outline what Alan discussed. Numbers 9 – 11 relate to True Blood, but do check out all 13, pretty interesting stuff.

9. Ball first encountered Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels when he arrived thirty minutes early to the dentist one day, not knowing how to time the distance between his house and the surgery in spite of his having lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years. Thank you, LA traffic, for your fortuitous inefficiency.

10. Australian (and presumeably other international) actors have less hang-ups about nudity on-screen than their American counterparts. Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer started hooking up by the second episode of season one of True Blood! But apparently they aren’t together anymore, which was news to me. That doesn’t matter, though, because they are ‘consummate professionals.’ Although apparently things can get a bit weird now that their characters have started hooking up with other characters on-screen. Including Alexander Skarsgård, who Wil would turn for, repeatedly. Again, everyone agreed.

11. When asked how he writes powerful female characters, like Sookie Stackhouse, Ball revealed that he has ‘a big girl inside of me’ that enables him to do so.

Read all 13 at Daily Pedestrian