True Blood, Season 2

I just finished watching the second season of HBO's series True Blood, and I'm a little conflicted. It was gloriously entertaining, with smart writing and pulse-pounding suspense. But it also stretched the envelope of outright silliness, with the climax taking place at a marriage ceremony with a god, with a large offering made of meat. I imagine the writers of the show sitting in a room, giggling, wondering whether they really could get away with this.

The second season allows us to move past a lot of the set-up of season one, namely that vampires are now open in society, though shunned by the religious right (an obvious parallel to homosexuality). Sookie Stackhouse, the psychic waitress, is now in a relationship with vampire Bill Compton. They have a new member of their household, the teenager Jessica, whom Bill was forced to turn into a vampire by the elders of his order (vampires, it seems, love hierarchy).

The season then spins off into three basic storylines: Eric, the brooding vampire and operator of the nightclub Fangtasia, enlists Sookie to use her psychic powers to find his "creator," who has gone missing in Dallas. Sookie's brother, the dim Jason, has let himself be recruited by a religious sect devoted to going to war with vampires, and Sookie's friend Tara has come under the spell of Maryann, a woman who makes Tara feel wanted, and has a penchant for hedonism. Too bad she turns out to be a supernatural being called a maenad, and she takes over the whole town and turns into Times Square on New Year's eve. And people show up dead with their hearts ripped out.

The religious right and maenad stories are parallel--characters who feel adrift finding solace in groups that say all the right things, but turn out to be nefarious. Michael McMillian and Anna Camp are the young married couple who run the Fellowship of Light, and unfortunately I don't think there's anything about them that is not realistic. I imagine, right now, there are plenty of Bible-thumpers ready to kill for Jesus.

The Fellowship story wraps up about halfway through the season, while the maenad plot covers the entire arc. Michelle Forbes is Maryann, and she's spooky good. When she does her thing the townspeople's eyes turn black and they start rutting with the closest person handy. It must be what the Playboy Mansion is like.

The show is full of lovely little moments. I liked how capitalism embraces the vampires--there's an airline devoted to their travel called Anubis (with coffins for daytime travel) and the vampire hotel in Dallas, with young people of different blood types on the room service menu and extra-heavy curtains to block out the sun, is called Carmilla (which was the name of the first vampire novel). The actors are all terrific--I enjoyed Ryan Kwanten as Jason, and Chris Bauer as the overzealous deputy Andy. Kwanten has a great line why he's so popular with girls--"I watch a lot of porn to learn things."

But the soul of the show is Anna Paquin as Sookie. Her character is so easy to root for--no matter what insanity swirls around her she keeps her bearings and behaves like Nancy Drew. When she has a showdown with Maryann, she leans forward and says, with an impeccable line reading, "What the fuck are you?"

All this and I forgot to mention Sam, who can turn into any animal at will. In the third season it seems we'll meet his parents, who are described as "evil," and we'll see more of Evan Rachel Wood as the Yahtzee-loving vampire queen of Louisiana (of course, the third season has already aired, but don't tell me what happens).