True Blood - The Pilot

Due to BitTorrent's initial slowness, I tried to watch the pilot episode of True Blood on tudou.com yesterday evening.

For clarification, Tudou is one of the many Asian video-sharing sites out there. It one-ups YouTube by going mostly unnoticed by the lawyers responsible for pulling various materials from YouTube and GoogleVideo. The downside is that many of the videos you will find on Tudou or MegaVideo or Veoh will be titled with Chinese characters.

So the second part of the True Blood pilot was there and labeled 'B', but there was no part 'A' to be found. Thus, I watched the last half hour of the 90-minute pilot.

By the time I woke up this morning, BitTorrent was finished with the transfer. So I watched the first fifteen minutes with breakfast before I had to brush my teeth and leave to catch my train.

So I've seen forty-five minutes of the pilot--forty-five broken minutes with a major gap in between.

And, happily, I'm excited to see the rest of it when I get home.


Much like the books, I get the feeling I'm going to feel split between the guys and whom I want Sookie to end up with. The actors playing Bill and Sam are mostly spot-on. Sam's hair is meant to be a bit more ... well, more, but the rest of him seems right. The actor's name is Sam too--and I seem to recall him as one of Dexter's trophy serial killers. The actress playing Sookie's friend Tara was Whitney on Passions. Tara is much less polite, but, strangely, I get the idea that the character is a better person.

The theme music (well, it might be the theme music; occasionally what you hear in the pilot is cut or changed by the time the show actually airs) is fitting for the setting and the plot. If there could be a Dark-Country genre (ala Dark Wave and/or Death Metal), that's how I'd describe the sound and lyrics. Better similarity--Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand."

So far as pacing goes, it looks like they might be going two to three chapters per episode, but my memory of Dead Until Dark might be a fuzzy (it's been at least five years since I read it). Whatever the case, I think they could get a good cable-season out of each book, the events of which are fairly episodic anyway. Granted, the Writers Strike could land the show on the chopping block before it's had its day, since it was meant to be out in early Spring this year, and it was pushed back to September. Still, it suits the Fall season. They might be better off.

Likely to follow this up once I've actually finished watching the full episode.