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"FacebookPinterest\n\nLet me guess: Like the restless hipster you are, you bailed on HBO&amp;#39;s True Blood last year if not earlier, am I right? You&amp;#39;ve got company. But maybe you don&amp;#39;t have a better half who craved The Boning of Sookie (Anna Paquin) by blond-beast Vampire Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) the way Cubs fans crave a World Series.\n\nOnce that was on the menu\u2014and this season built to The Boning in the understated fashion of, say, J.K. Rowling announcing a new Harry Potter book\u2014I surrendered the remote as fast as Obama making a concession. I know which side my fingers are buttered on, put it that way.\n\nAnd whaddya know? It turns out True Blood has gotten a lot sillier since I fell off the trolley, but &amp;quot;silly&amp;quot; is a pretty relative term here. Creator Alan Ball&amp;#39;s original, very funny premise\u2014vampires = Teh Gays, opting to go mainstream despite bigotry\u2014is now ancient history. Instead, the paranormal gimmick has eoliated, going from metaphor to yard sale.\n\nBy now, with shape-shifters, werewolves, witches and whatnot under every rock\u2014not to mention Sookie&amp;#39;s own discovery that she&amp;#39;s a refugee from someplace with Lifetime Channel special effects known as &amp;quot;Fairyland&amp;quot;\u2014damn near the only ordinary folks left in Bon Temps, Louisiana, are Terry, the PTSD-afflicted Iraq war vet, and his honey, Arlene. Then again, she did give birth to a demon baby whose twinkling eyes look as if he&amp;#39;s just secretly downloaded Machiavelli&amp;#39;s collected works on Kindle and thinks they&amp;#39;re a gas.\n\nIn one way or another, this always happens. TV shows that start out comically or spookily hitting us where we live, end up dragging us to where they live instead, usually at the expense of resonance anywhere outside their own self-contained universe. And that&amp;#39;s the hermetic stage fanboys love, or fangirls (I&amp;#39;m guessing) in True Blood&amp;#39;s case.\n\nLost is the most obvious example of this, one reason cranky real-world guys like me got less and less interested even as devotees thrived on each new glimpse of the watchworks. But the granddaddy of them all was Star Trek. The original 1960s version was an allegory for all sorts of then-timely liberal shibboleths, making it the perfect sci-fi mirror to Lyndon Johnson&amp;#39;s Great Society. Every iteration since has simply been about Star Trek&amp;#39;s own lore.\n\nEven so, Ball is no dummy. He knows how to stick in topical Easter eggs for the likes of me, including what may be the funniest sendup so far of the Obama presidency. These days, Vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) is the undead King of Louisiana\u2014installed in the job by a cabal of similarly reform-minded bloodsuckers who hope he&amp;#39;ll transcend the old fractiousness. He&amp;#39;s got all the right moves, and yet he&amp;#39;s no good at it.\n\nBy which I definitely mean the character, not the actor. Moyer, who never looked all that comfortable as Sookie&amp;#39;s love interest, seems much happier with his new comic role. Barking out directives that everyone yawns at, Bill&amp;#39;s ineffectuality in the face of his unrepentant adversaries gets at something crucial in Obama&amp;#39;s failure to keep 2008&amp;#39;s fires ignited in the popular imagination. For our first Martian president, the dude&amp;#39;s awfully damned dull.\n\nOtherwise, silly or not, the performances\u2014certainly more than the scripts, now in full-on &amp;quot;What next?&amp;quot; mode\u2014are what keeps selling True Blood. Paquin herself seems a mite bored with playing Sookie: &amp;quot;Go wide-eyed, then say something down-home and sharp, then take my clothes off. What else is new?&amp;quot; But everybody else is having a high old time, from Deborah Ann Woll as avid Jessica to the irresistible Ryan Kwanten as Sookie&amp;#39;s brother, Jason. He&amp;#39;s the classic Shit Happens character no TV drama can live without, since he&amp;#39;s gone from coping with a vampire-blood erectile overdrive to joining the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun to learning he&amp;#39;s turned &amp;quot;werepanther.&amp;quot;\n\nEven Skarsgard, who was often erratic in his Evil Eric days\u2014he looked the part, sure, but its body language seemed to be something he&amp;#39;d learned phonetically\u2014has gotten much better (and funnier) now that Eric has lost all memory of his crimes and turned into the undead Forrest Gump. And then there&amp;#39;s the great Fiona Shaw, recruited this year to play a sinister Wiccan den mother whose grudge against vamps dates back to the Spanish Inquisition. I&amp;#39;ve seen her act\u2014brilliantly, too\u2014in Samuel Beckett&amp;#39;s Happy Days onstage, and yet she doesn&amp;#39;t condescend to Ball&amp;#39;s material any more than she did to playing a minor character in the Harry Potter franchise. For actresses in Shaw&amp;#39;s league, profundity is where you find it.\n\n Now that The Boning is over and done with, my better half may very well lose interest in True Blood all over again. Unless I miss my guess, Ball is losing interest too; even though the series has been renewed for a fifth season in 2012, it&amp;#39;s hard to see what more he can do with it besides upping the ridiculous\u2014and from where I sit, that means it&amp;#39;s crossover time. Maybe they&amp;#39;ll all hop a bus from Bon Temps to New Orleans and invade the third season of Treme."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/true-blood-obama-administration-politics>