Over the last 10-15 years, it's been difficult to move without bumping into a vampire. With the global success of the Twilight films and The Vampire Diaries, among so many others, you'd think that the graves of the world must be fully emptied of reanimated corpses by now. Inanimate corpse might be a more suitable description of the empty, emotionless and ridiculously popular True Blood. This is a show marred by its pandering attempts to please a mainstream audience that is fascinated with romantic gothic soap operas about the undead. The style is a bizarre attempt to marry teenage drama with gothic horror, which would be fine as a one-off... But when so many shows and films are doing it, the hype carries them along rather than actual quality. True Blood is the ultimate example of this. It just isn't very good. It comprises campy acting, dull plots and a group of characters that are incredibly difficult to care about into a deeply generic show. Yet it's unbelievably popular, owing to the ongoing obsession with the genre. If you want a truly remarkable version of romanic vampiric media, go watch Let The Right One In or A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. It doesn't matter if the books are your favourite thing ever, and you think they make up for the series' faults. True Blood should be able to stand on its own merits as a television series, but really it sucks.
