TV: MY FAVOURITE DRAMA SERIES ARE BACK

I use the term drama very loosely as only one of them fits that description. And that's-

Skins. For the first time in four seasons, I'm not doing a weekly recap/review. I still like it but this third generation just hasn't grabbed me the way the previous two did. I'll say one thing for it though, it's unpredictable. Whether or not this is a good thing is debatable as they killed off the best character in the second episode of this new season (the adorable Grace) and in the third introduced a brand new character who seems to follow the rules of Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man.

Rich and the long lamented Grace

A new season of Castle starts again tonight as does a half season of Fringe following a mid-season hiatus. The end of the last season of Castle had him declaring his love for Detective Kate Beckett as she lay dying, not that she'll die of course. I'll be really pissed off if she doesn't remember when she wakes up as this would be the worst form of cop out. Fringe with its parallel worlds and the marvellous John Noble as a literally mad scientist is just unmissable especially, as has long been expected, there is actually a third parallel world to complicate matters.

Thursday nights are great with The Good Wife, Body of Proof, and Rizzoli and  Isles. The Good Wife is a terrific legal drama series with a marvellous ensemble cast. Body of Proof isn't brilliant but it does start the brilliant Dana Delany who makes anything worth watching. Rizzoli and Isles is (in my dreams and the dreams of many others: fact) a lesbian version of Castle, Sadly in the real world it's a mismatched buddy-buddy drama of female detective from a cop family and her eccentric dissecting doctor from an affluent family (but adopted!) friend.

In this season, The Not-So Good Wife

Sunday night  is horror-fantasy night with the return of BBC3 series Being Human and HBO series True Blood. BH has gone for the change everything approach. One of the four main characters was killed of at the end of the previous series, one in between series plus the villain, and one in the first episode where we also meet another ghost-vampire-werewolf triad, new vamp villains, and a new future heroine who wants to kill her baby self in order to save the world. Jesus! TB is just more of the same if you assume that the same is everything changing from week to week. After 15 minutes in fairyland Sookie escapes to find a year has passed. Vampire Eric has secretly bought her house, her boyfriend is now King of Louisiana and a badass. Her best woman friend, the nutty Tara, has moved away to become a cage-fighter and a lesbian (yay!). Her sex-mad irresponsible brother is now a serious-minded cop. And more. Loved it.

 Couldn't find a pic of her snogging her girlfriend

What is it about me and TV series with strong attractive women in them? Coincidence? Are the best current series just happening to have strong attractive women characters? Who cares? These are all pretty good to great shows which I enjoy a lot. Me, I think TV as entertainment has never been better.

Post Script.

I'm also enjoying BBC1's Call The Midwife. Which is a bit out of my usual taste in TV but it is very well done.

Having the delightful Miranda Hart in a straight role doesn't hurt either.

DVD: True Blood Season 1 (2009)

The latest cult tv series, which has just started to air in the UK, arrives on Region 1 DVD and is it worth the hype that's been generated about it? Is this really the greatest fantasy series since Buffy?

For the first three episodes I wasn't sure. It took a little while to get into it, partly because of the way it was filmed; lacking the glossy image of film, it almost seemed cheap. The local Louisiana accent seemed somewhat stilted to me too. Then, of course, there's the introduction of a whole new bunch of characters and for a while I sometimes got confused between two of the male leads. It also seemed a lot darker than the books (or so memory tells me) while remaining quite faithful. I was enjoying it certainly, but it didn't click home until around episode 3 and then-

Fuck me, this is really good.

It also makes Buffy look like the Sarah Jane Adventures -tea-time viewing. True Blood is rough stuff. The violence alone will earn it an 18 rating when the UK DVD is finally released. But then so will the explicit sex which verges on being soft-core porn with its nudity and positions other than the missionary one. And also the language which, if not quite as frequent as Goodfellas, is nevertheless frequent. Put together this series is not for the sensitive and squeamish.

Gore and sex alone, however, do not make for a good program. Though they don't hurt either. The characters, once you get to know them, are strong and interesting and well played by the leads, four of whom are shown above with the two romantic leads on top. Underneath is Sam, the sympathetic bar owner with a secret, and Tara, our heroine's best friend and motormouth and my favourite character. There are more, in particular Lafayette, Tara's cousin, cook at Sam's bar, and also tough guy, effeminate gay, and drug dealer -I like him too. Then there's also Josh, Sookie's black sheep brother. These are the key characters but then is also a large supporting cast with important roles to play.

I'm deliberately not going to write too much about the plot because it's best enjoyed with as few preconceptions as possible. I will tell you that it's likely to go in directions you don't expect including people you thought would be in it to the end. There's much more to it than just a supernatural love story. There is a very blatant subtext which two items make explicitly clear. A sign that reads: God Hates Fangs. Remove the 'n' and what have you got? Then there's the news item where Vermont makes vampire marriage legal. And that Alan Ball, the talented creator of the series, is himself openly gay. Vampires have always been a commonly used metaphor for the outsider figure but here the metaphor is very specific. By the way, this isn't a criticism, I like the very pointedness of it. It gives the series an extra resonance.

At the end the ongoing serial killer thread is resolved and elements have been put in place for season 2 and, I've since learned, there's going to be a lesbian vampire Queen of New Orleans appearing. And I've got to wait a whole year to see it. God dayum.