TCA PRESS TOUR: HBO's 'True Blood'

So now we've had our first true network presentation here at this summer's Television Critics Association press tour. Oh, wait -- the presenter was HBO. Sure seemed like an actual broadcast network, though. In three businesslike hours, the premium cabler touted a wider range of program types than most over-the-air networks present over two full TCA days of star-laden panels, glitzy parties and showbiz hype-o-rama.

No pop culture phenomenon like The Sopranos or Sex and the City this time. Just something perhaps even more impressive -- a broad spectrum of solid choices that all stand for quality in various proficient ways, demonstrating that even without an audacious blockbuster or critical darling, HBO continues to deliver a truly premium lineup.

There was the big and "important" miniseries -- this weekend's Generation Kill (Sundays at 9 p.m. ET starting July 13), a seven-part docudrama "embedding" us in the first month of the Iraq war with a unit of elite Marines, from The Wire producer David Simon. (Read David Bianculli's take on Generation Kill here.)

And there was another HBO drama series that people will talk about -- the wildly entertaining sex-and-vampires drama True Blood (debuting Sept. 7), a lurid yet funny and possibly profound Louisiana-set melodrama from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. [HBO photo above: Ball on right, with stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer.]

And a new comedy that people will love or loathe -- Little Britain USA (debuting Sept. 28), adapted from the BBC sketchfest where two men create and play all sorts of bizarrely archetypal everyday men and women from both sides of the Atlantic, who behave in the most obliviously, good-naturedly, totally offensive ways.

And stand-up comedy from a unique talent -- a fall special showcasing Ricky Gervais, grinningly awkward creator-star of the BBC's original The Office and HBO's Extras.

And a relevant documentary -- Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House (Aug. 18), about the front-row press conference reporter who's covered nine presidents, here profiled by a documentarian who was the niece of one and might have been the daughter of another, Rory Kennedy.

All of which makes me want to say you don't need to hit a grand-slam home run every at-bat, when steady singles and doubles will score just as many runs. But HBO co-president Michael Lombardo was already working a baseball metaphor in answering critics' questions Thursday afternoon in a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom.

"It's always heartening to get a big audience," Lombardo allowed. "But it would be a mistake for us to be swinging for home runs because that's when you're apt to not deliver on quality." If shows don't get big-time buzz, Lombardo said, yet "they are done well and engage a significant or a sizable group that's unbelievably loyal, that will be fine."

This didn't come off as an excuse for not having another Sopranos, either, but as astute thinking at a moment that smash-bereft HBO might inadvisably resort to panicky big-swings-for-the-fences. Lombardo's presidential cohort Richard Plepler noted, "There's 30 million subscribers, and there are many different sensibilities among those 30 million subscribers. And to different pockets of that 30 million, different things resonate." (In other words, don't worry, Real Sex and its late-night skin kin will be around for awhile.) "We're looking to satisfy a wide cross-section of tastes across our subscriber base," Plepler said. "People have an emotional connection to different things." He meant "different" people have that, but each of us can also adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the same time we love Law & Order.

HBO's lead fall series is much closer to the former than the latter. True Blood, adapted from the Charlaine Harris novels of the southern gothic supernatural, has vampires coming "out of the coffin" in figurative terms, surfacing after the invention of synthetic blood allows them to live openly as the newest spat-upon minority group agitating for equal rights. Set in a steamy delta podunk town, the action is hot and heavy with kinky interspecies sex ("fangbangers"), courtly bloodsuckers, plucky bar waitresses, backwoods outlaws, and a definite Twin Peaks-ian vibe. The lure of the forbidden drips like sweat on a sticky summer night.

So what if it's not The Sopranos? Lombardo got it right when he noted "True Blood is a show that's enormously fun to watch." Series creator Alan Ball said here he's just trying to do justice to Harris' addictive Sookie Stackhouse books. He found her first vampire tale "totally by accident," killing time at a bookstore before a dentist's appointment (which sounds like the sort of ironic juxtaposition an episode might feature), and quickly discovered "it's the kind of book that you think you're gonna read one chapter before you go to bed and you wind up reading seven."

His series adaptation is funny, funky, creepy, kinky, sentimental, deep and trashy, all at once, as bountiful a bundle of alluring attributes as its protagonist -- a young, blonde, mind-reading waitress-loner played by Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar at the age of 10 for The Piano back in 1993. (She also played Rogue in the X-Men movies.)

"She's so many things in one person," Paquin said here. "She's tough and she's courageous and she's smart, but she's sweet and she's innocent and she's naive and she's quite sheltered. And she is completely open-minded, which, in her very small town is a little bit less common. And there's just something about that level of enthusiasm that she has for things that are new and things that are exciting as opposed to being frightened." In other words, she's drawn to that broody new-bloodsucker-in-town (Stephen Moyer), who can only come out at night and reveals mysterious powers to match her own.

The pilot hour alone features gut-crunching fights and icky murders and graphic sex and "God hates fangs" debates on cable TV. (And every episode promises a kick-ass cliffhanger.) Ball gives us a world that's entirely distinct, believable and relatable, yet truly its own universe. "It's a world that isn't so media-saturated," Ball noted happily. "It's a world where people are actually interacting with each other rather than sitting at their computer reading blogs all the time."

True Blood is visceral. You can feel it, smell it, taste it, which makes it delectable to consume if not profound to ponder. And that's a big "if," with critics having seen just two hours so far. "Part of the joy of this whole series is that it's about vampires, and so we don't have to be that serious about it," said Ball, as he was asked about the allegorical sociology of the show's oppressed caste. "However, they totally work as a metaphor for gays, for people of color in previous times in America, for anybody who is misunderstood and feared and hated for being different. I think it's a bigger metaphor, and at the same time, it's also not a metaphor at all. It's vampires."

Told you HBO was into everything.

(They're also into multimedia in a big way with True Blood. A "prequel" campaign is already up and running with online's Blood Copy Report, a website chronicling "the amazing days we live in as vampires attempt to integrate with humans." New video "news coverage" rolls out weekly.)