TV is the New Reading

“True Blood,” “Burn Notice” part of summerful of good programming

I grew up in the 1970s. There were four channels. I got a fifth channel when I was about 14 or so. Other people were already experiencing the wonders of cable, but out where I grew up in the middle of nowhere, we got four channels and that by God was enough.

There was actual programming for maybe about eight months with a six-week break over November and December for “specials” and when the clock struck May 26 an iron door slammed. Everyone go outside and play in the sprinklers and get melanoma because there’s nothing on the box except for the Iowa farm report on all channels, right on through ‘til September.

I remember when NBC Thursdays went from “must-see TV” to a sort of lame summer holdover for its reruns – that if you didn’t watch them over the regular broadcast season (and who would have?) “It’s new to you.”

Now there’s so much fresh summer programming on cable channels I can’t even watch it all – and some of it is well worth watching – that network reruns don’t stand a chance. They don’t want to spend any additional money competing for an audience which, let’s face it, is all at the beach – so they trot out their generally tired slate of reality shows and hope there’s a captive audience that only gets broadcast – even after the digital conversion.

I’ll contain my exultation this week to two entries – “True Blood” on HBO and “Burn Notice” on USA.

“True Blood”

I don’t know why “True Blood” on HBO bothers with seasons. Each episode casts an enchantment all its own. Each episode explores a range of violence, mistrust, lust and love and raw powerful sex that it’s easy to forget this is just a little Southern town with a fold-out obituary section since vampires made themselves known. They can survive on synthetic blood which cuts down a bit on their ick factor, but they do still bite people, they kill out of jealousy and rage and so do people.

And vampires aren’t even that cool. In fact, now that they’re on the teevee and everyone knows about them, they’re a little mundane – especially when compared to a telepathic Southern belle named Sookie, played by Anna Paquin who I’m sorry but is way more compelling than that kid in “The Listener.” Sookie is pursuing a wild relationship with Bill, a man who was sired during the war of Northern agression. Bill, a vampire, has plenty of his own issues, not least of which that he ended a vampire who was attacking Sookie and as punishment had to sire a homeschooled teenage girl.

Other storylines playing out in Bon Temps, La., are Sookie’s brother Jason who’s so mystically seductive – well, maybe not that mystically if you’ve seen him with his shirt off you kinda get it – anyway he’s got his anti-vampire spiritual leader’s wife all weak in the knees. He’s a recovering V addict – vampire’s blood is a powerful psychoactive, and he briefly kept a vampire in his basement bound in silver to feed his addiction. Also, his best friend Rene made the rounds murdering the not-small number of women he slept with to make him look like a serial killer. Oh, and Sookie’s boss is a shapeshifter, who has gotten himself mixed up with some manifestation of a pagan deity, and Sookie’s best friend Tara is potentially possessed. Tara’s mother, an alcoholic from way back, was cured in an encounter with a voodou priestess who’d seen some darkness in Tara. When Tara discovered that the witch daylighted as a shopclerk in a neighboring town she attacked her – which I’ll just point out doesn’t mean that what she saw in Tara wasn’t real. Tara is now somehow mixed up with her shapeshifting boss’s pagan deity and I can’t wait to see how.

The problem is that “True Blood” is not a show. It’s a serial movie. Each episode, even the second-season premiere, picks up immediately where the last one left off, and while that fuels an emotional immediacy that drives the show, it rarely feels like a complete story in an Aristotelian ideal. In terms of beginning, middle and end, it’s almost all middle, with new storylines opening and closing but only a muddly understanding of character development (Sookie and Bill, for example, have an impossibly rollercoastery relationship even for vampire literature). So what’s driving the story – apart from the hot sex – is the violence, which producer Alan Ball has demonstrated he has no problem with. A vampire tore a person limb from limb on camera. It was as gross as you could imagine it would be.

All that being said, sexy Southerners are perfectly compelling all on their own without any vampire storyline, so apart from the occassional gore this is an incredibly beautiful show. Anna Paquin is just freakishly beautiful and so is nearly everyone else and they all show lots of skin so indeed, you’ve got about 70 percent of the draw right there, and the rest is the reasonably acceptable writing and backstory that gets you from one sex scene to the next.

Finally, since this is an Alan Ball production, gotta bring it up. Vampirism in literature is nearly always a metaphor for something else, and in this case the fundamentalist sect Children of the Sun speaking out against vampires and the image from the magnificent opening sequence “God Hates Fangs” suggests an interest among the show’s production team to make an occasional statement about the religious persecution of homosexuals in America. In that there are at least nine states that recognize same-sex unions it feels like gay rights are at least making some headway in the national debate, but this show has certainly focused on some of the uglier instances of homophobia, both directly and in the context of vampire rights. In that it doesn’t detract too much from pretty people running around in various states of undress, biting, fighting and having sex with each other, really, any subtext will do.

“Burn Notice”

This season of “Burn Notice” on USA is recognizing that the show is a show in transition. Michael Westen, played by Jeffery Donovan, from the pilot episode is a spy who’s received what I guess is called a “burn notice,” that his espionage credentials have been pulled and he’s inactive, dropped in Miami and left to rot. While this seems like a terrible retirement plan for spies – and really, who then would go into the biz with this to look forward to? – the show has been consistently good. Michael talks about how a spy sees the world, he gets into scrapes as his gunrunning girlfriend Fiona Glenanne and FBI contact Sam Axe help him out, and his mother occasionally encounters people – occasionally his own brother – who need his help.

The show has always been about Michael finding out who put the burn notice on him and getting his job back, but it has been about so many other things since then that this season he’s actually drawing some attention from the local police. Moon Bloodgood (the Journeyman’s ex-girlfriend Livia in NBC’s “Journeyman”) has been making inquiries as Det. Paxson. She’s tenacious and very good and makes Michael nervous enough that he’s dismantling his entire operation he’s been using to help people with their various problems and gather information. Really, with all he’s put together on himself over the years his loft should look like a lab at MIT but it’s actually been blown up and searched several times over and it doesn’t even have air conditioning. Since neither Fiona nor Sam seem to have any permanent digs Michael might be keeping all his stuff at his mom’s but Sharon Gless – she’s actually grown on me since past reviews; his mom has become an almost acceptable character if we judiciously limit her screen time – is a bit too nosey for that to be likely.

Well, whatever he’s been up to, he undermined the Miami operation of whoever this Carla person was last season and thwarted her big assassination attempt against … that was never especially clear, and government operatives who were tracking her grabbed Michael and dropped him from a helicopter into the ocean and now the police are after him, so the show seems destined to transition into a “psych” type story starring a detective with hyperobservant spy skills. Call it Miami Psych. That being said, it’s still got a lot of “cool” left in it. Donovan plays Westen perfectly and is convincing in every personality he takes on in running down his cases. Even if this were a situation of “psych” meets “Macgyver,” I think the writing and acting are there to make it work.

New episodes of “True Blood” air Sundays at 10/9c on HBO and are available in that channel’s on-demand lineup. New episodes of “Burn Notice” air at 9/8c Thursdays on USA.

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