Alan Ball and his writing and producing team for HBO’s True Blood talked gay undertones, spoilers and why pop culture is currently obsessed with vampires Wednesday night during a Paley Center for Media panel in Beverly Hills.
Ball, who created the books based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, said the gay rights metaphors built into the series were “not the main point of the show; that’s just kind of some fun window dressing. It only is a symbol for the gay and lesbian community because that’s what’s going on right now. I mean, 50 years ago it would have been African-Americans, 100 years ago it would have been women and their struggles for equality and the right to vote, that kind of thing.”
“To me, that’s all from Charlaine’s books and it makes it relevant in a way that is kind of fun and contemporary,” the series creator/executive producer added. “But to me it’s not the heart of the show; it’s part of the fabric.”
Co-executive producer Nancy Oliver added that the gay rights metaphors are “part of the vampire myth as well. I think part of the appeal is the outsider appeal for the supernatural and that (vampires) don’t belong to this (group) and they don’t belong to that (group).”
Touching on the nature of what it means to be on pay cable network HBO, Oliver said one of the many benefits is that “anything goes” when it comes to the frequent sex scenes on True Blood.
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“Anything goes, anything rocks and at least you can pitch it to the (writers’) table and generally it winds up on television,” she said.
“To me, vampires and the notion of vampires and vampires as a metaphor basically is sex,” Ball added. “Of course that’s going to have to be a part of it and of course that’s going to be a part of the show, but that’s why people like vampires: because they’re sexy; even in the Victorian era, it was a metaphor for sex that people couldn’t talk about.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to not go there when that’s basically what the subject matter is all about to begin with,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean that we put sex in there just to have it in there — because that’s not interesting — but when ever there is sex in there, it feels real and it’s adult and it’s actually about something; it’s actually about in Jason’s (Ryan Kwanten) case it can be about avoiding intimacy."
"In Sookie (Anna Paquin) and Bill’s (Stephen Moyer) case it can be about two people who thought this was not possible to have this kind of emotionally and soul communion with another creature and we discovered that it is possible. So I can’t imagine having the show anywhere but HBO."
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Ball later addressed the current wave of vampire mania sweeping film and television with shows like the CW’s The Vampire Diaries and Summit Entertainment’s boxoffice hit Twilight and that he was “completely unaware of Twilight at the time” he discovered the book series.
“Why is there such a big vampire moment? I do know it’s not the first one; we’ve had many vampire moments, vampires have always been really powerful symbols within the culture and pop culture and we just happen to have a convergence of a lot of things happening at the same time,” Ball said. “If it’s happening for any other reason other than coincidence … I would venture to say it’s because we had a vampire in the White House for eight years and now we’re just waking up from that.”
As for what fans of the genre show can expect from the upcoming third season, Ball teased that Sookie will get closer to finding out what she is; vampire henchwoman Pam (Kristin Bauer) will “have a lot on her hands”; vampire rights spokeswoman Nan Flanigan (Jessica Tuck) will “make a showing at Fangtasia”; we will see more of Evan Rachel Wood’s lesbian vampire queen; and that Season 2’s cliffhanger of who kidnapped Bill will be answered in the first episode of Season 3.
True Blood returns to HBO in June 2010.
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