True Blood

Every line, every reaction is perfectly pitched, every shift from humor to menace to seduction perfectly played.

Luckily Blood is still buoyed by its weird, Gothic zest and the performers all operate with the same vibe of ripe sexuality and restrained camp. [4 Jul 2011, p.37]

Blood creator Alan Ball knows how to juggle multiple pretty people and knotty, danger-stuffed story lines for the maximum amount of breathless romance and over-the-top action.

HBO's True Blood rises from the grave of last year's uneven season, smarter, spookier and sexier than before.

The thrill of discovery is long gone for True Blood. But the thrill of a new season is still very much in play. The first three episode of Season 4 had just enough pulling power to keep me in the fold.

True Blood is a much guiltier, trashier pleasure than the monumental Thrones, but I wouldn't miss it for all the hush puppies in Louisiana.

Shaw and her adherents are poised to bring some critical leavening to a series that maybe could use it. Season four still might end with the introduction of a band of lusty minotaurs or cokehead sasquatches, but, as it begins, we should be encouraged-and thanks to Shaw's boffo performance, delighted-to see True Blood thinking, even for a moment, about controlling itself.

This season, as before, True Blood employs its supernatural others to signify cultural anxieties about race and sexuality. Now these anxieties are foregrounded in some of the human protagonists. It's a necessary shift: while the show has always portrayed elements of the vampire community as corrupt, we have been assured that Bill, and maybe a few others, were merely misunderstood. As this story has lost credibility, the vampires as a plausible metaphor for "accepting difference" is falling apart.

The witches are an intriguing presence, but other parts of the show aren't casting the same spell as the magnificent Shaw. If you're addicted to True Blood's brand of smoldering melodrama, well, there's a lot of it this season. And it looks as though about half of it might actually be worth watching.

The new episodes push the saga in a few initially intriguing directions, but the cast keeps expanding into an overpopulated mishmash of disparate story threads that no longer weave together as a whole.

True Blood also sometimes seems to have a cast of thousands, despite being set in a small town, so all sorts of subplots have been simmering. The show evolves, as it has before, by starting the new season with a few more. It's a little wearing sometimes, to be honest, though it has enough narrative strength to keep hard-core fans happy.