schmevil | "I Won’t Be Seduced by ‘True Blood’"

I Won’t Be Seduced by ‘True Blood’
The HBO vampire series leaves me cold, and it's not because of all the dead bodies
Joshua Alston, Newsweek

I don't like the way True Blood's black characters relate to the white characters or to each other. There are mainly two: Tara (Rutina Wesley), the tough-and-tender sidekick to Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), and her androgynous cousin, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis). Tara and Lafayette take turns filling the role of the sassy black person who says what the audience would be thinking if the audience's thoughts were quippier. In their downtime, they're sniping at each other or dealing with personal problems. For Tara, it's her abusive mother, a drunk so shambling she routinely drools while speaking, and for Lafayette, it's fallout from his part-time drug dealing and Webcam sex business. Worse yet, neither Tara nor Lafayette seems to exist outside of their relationships to the white characters. They are the racial equivalent of the wise, gay sidekick who has plenty of love advice for his female friend, but no apparent love life of his own.

I know, I know. True Blood's Bon Temps, La., isn't supposed to be an accurate reflection of life for blacks in the South. Or for anybody, for that matter, what with the bloodsuckers, mind-readers, exorcisms, and all-around bad juju going on. But this isn't a conclusion I drew after careful analysis. The show made me uncomfortable from the beginning, and I could never put a finger on why. It hit me this season, when Lafayette is pleading with Eric, a white vampire, to release him from the basement dungeon in which he's shackled. I was reminded of how I felt watching James Harris, the black Wisconsin voter who beseeched John McCain to battle harder against Barack Obama. It's a kind of gut-level disgust that effortlessly bounds over logic

Picked this up via Trueblood_TV on LJ. It's an interesting read. I don't necessarily agree with him but he teases out some of the potentially troubling aspects of the show. Spoilers for S2.

Some of the comments on comm are just... flail-worthy.