True Blood is hands down one of my favorite shows of all time. I know it’s not always been perfect and that shows like The Sopranos gravitate on a whole different plane, but I love shows about the supernatural, especially when the production values are there, and True Blood had them in spades.
Creator and master-of-originality Alan Ball adapted Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels into the True Blood we all know and love. It features vampires, werewolves, witches, shape-shifters, a maenad, faeries, a hybrid fairy/vampire, and much more.
Alan Ball handed off the reins of the show at the end of a middling season 5. The new show-runners proved themselves capable during season 6, but alas dropped the ball spectacularly for the seventh and last.
I think the biggest mistake they made was to try and give each character, major or minor, the most satisfying closure imaginable, which for a show as bloody and dark as True Blood turned out to be the wrong call.
While the season picks up from the season 6 cliffhanger, with the Hep-V fangers about to attack the citizens of Bon Temps and their vampire defenders, their threat is quickly dispatched within a couple episodes. My reaction was, “And now? Now that you’ve dispatched the only plausible ‘bad guys’ left around, what are our heroes and heroines supposed to do for the rest of the season?” Turns out, the show-runners’ answer was, “Make up and make nice!!”
That sucks (no pun intended). Pretty much everything that happens from that point on to Sookie, Bill, Eric, Jason, Jessica, Sam, Pam, Lafayette, and even Alcide is simply geared towards putting all the pieces of the puzzle back together so that the highest amount of normalcy can be achieved for the largest number of characters.
Sorry, it didn’t work for me. I was very disappointed and felt like the producers should have been gutsier and gone out with a bang. For a show that deftly dealt with some really outlandish storylines, this felt like a copout.
I think they should have tried to bring in even more mystical creatures (like the maenad) and powerful human ones (like the witches) and set up some sort of humongous melee during which many characters may have met their demise but that would have kept us on the edge of our seats.
Instead, we got served a bunch of boring and forced plot points that ultimately gave the series a black eye. Too bad.
Grade – Season 7: 4 – Overall: 9
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