My enthusiasm for
True Blood has waned lately, thanks to the reckless and misfiring third season. Still, it's been announced that
Courtney Ford (The Vampire Diaries, Grey's Anatomy) is joining the show as Portia Bellefleur, a sister of Sheriff Andy Bellefleur who runs a law firm, described as a "Southern beauty". Ford joins the recently announced
Fiona Shaw (Harry Potter) as a new addition to the fourth season, to be based on the Charlaine Harris novel Dead To The World, which has a theme of witchcraft. I'm still bemused that every season of True Blood expands the cast, to increasingly unwieldy proportions, particularly as this means the original characters have less material to work with. It was frankly embarrassing to watch season 3 smother itself with subplots that went nowhere, while throwing scraps to the actors who've been on the show from the start. While it's true that continuing TV dramas benefit from injections of fresh blood, you need to ensure your core characters don't get ignored, or at the very least start killing some to maintain a balance. This is
exactly what Lost did; each season found a way to bring in new faces, but the primary focus was
always on the original castaways, and there were regular deaths to prevent things become unmanageable. True Blood could learn a thing or two from that show...