I Wanna Do Bad Things With You

I don’t know if HBO’s True Blood will be a hit, but it had me at hello with its opening credits.

Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic for The New York Times went so far as to describe the show’s opening montage as “amazing, hallucinatory,” and suggested that the actual show didn’t live up to its introduction.    

The vampire opus True Blood, from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, is set in a swamp-water hamlet in Louisiana. In the opening montage, we see: shots of the bayou; the KKK; gators; African-Americans in their church; possum road kill; rednecks whopping it up in a bar; a writhing dancer; a rotting fox (in time lapse, with maggots destroying the carcass); a striking snake; a Venus flytrap devouring prey; and an evangelical baptism in a river, among other things. The sum is greater than the parts — take my word for it, or tune in yourself.

Are these images stereotypes of the South, and Louisiana? I don’t know, but Ball is a Southerner himself, so maybe he has geographic license to use these images.

But the crowning touch on the opening is the music, a song with the refrain “I wanna do bad things with you.” I had to go on a True Blood fan blog to learn that the haunting tune, Bad Things, is by country singer Jace Everett. I’ve played the True Blood review  DVDs several dozen times over, just to hear that song again and again. Everett may be a country music icon, but I’ve never hard of him. But hey, I’m from Jersey (where no one is named “Jace”), so what do I know from country music?

Everett’s Web site, www.jaceeverett.com, has a clip of him performing the song on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

True Blood has received some mixed reviews, but I like it. And it’s not that I’m a vampire or Alan Ball groupie. I never saw even one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was not a particular fan of Six Feet Under.

 For one, I find True Blood laugh-out loud funny at times. The show is definitely a send-up of American culture, and its mistrust and mistreatment of outsiders, but it’s the program’s little moments that I like. In one episode, there’s a scene where William Sanderson, playing a cop, mimics a vampire by wiggling his two fingers like fangs. It doesn’t sound like much, but it cracked me up. Check it out. 

Some critics have complained about the sex, violence and gore in True Blood. Are you kidding me? This is HBO. And has anyone watched broadcast TV recently? On Bones we were recently treated to a view of a shredded, decapitated corpse. When we finally see the rotted head, its eyeball pops out, a real treat for viewers.  

And I, for one, love what many critics have skewered about True Blood: The rocky romance between waitress Sookie Stackhouse, played by Anna Paquin, and courtly vampire Bill Compton, portrayed by Stephen Moyer.

One critic griped that Moyer played his vampire like a mope. The Los Angeles Times said Moyer was trying to put a brooding, Heathcliff-like spin on his bloodsucker. That works for me.  

I guess the appeal is that no matter how civilized and gentlemanly Compton appears, he can’t stop himself from baring his fangs when he sees a naked, outstretched neck. I like that in a man.