Let’s be honest: True Blood wasn’t just trashy, it was trash

Let’s all take a minute to remember why True Blood was and still is hot garbage on the 10th anniversary of its premiere.

This article contain spoilers for all seven seasons of True Blood.

Sometimes you recognize a show is broken beyond repair, yet you can’t bring yourself to stop watching it.

That happened to me with three shows, all of which premiered between 2006-09:

• Based on its first season, I genuinely thought Heroes had the potential to be the next Lost. Oh how wrong I was, and yet I still watched all five seasons of its original run. (I wasn’t willing to let Heroes: Reborn burn me again.)
• Call me a sucker, but the first season of Glee was legitimately interesting, entertaining television. And like a masochist I stuck with the show for its entire six-season lifespan despite knowing full well it had become unwatchable in season 3.
• And then there was True Blood, which had two wonderfully trashy seasons before the rails came off permanently.

Today is the 10th anniversary of True Blood‘s debut on HBO. We didn’t need a decade to go by to make this point, but it’s worth reiterating for anyone interested in checking out the seven-season adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels that it’s not worth the commitment.

My dedication to seeing True Blood through to the end raises a lot of questions about the relationship a viewer can form with a TV show. Why do we watch objectively bad TV? What do we hope to get out of the experience? Is it a twisted form of schadenfreude? The psychological implications of a person’s desire to continue on with a show after recognizing its creative failures are genuinely fascinating.

I’ve put some thought into why I refused to quit True Blood despite the fact it had gone from a guilty pleasure to an embarrassment when I had to admit to friends I was still watching it. Here are the best explanations I was able to come up with:

• The first two seasons of True Blood were very, very good. It came out at the height of the vampire craze and provided a fun, hyper-adult antidote to the sanitized vampire romances of Twilight. Its Deep South setting, weird but lovable cast of characters and a clever-for-its-time racism metaphor via magical creatures made for an enjoyable, gory and sexy ride.
• Call me a sucker, but I genuinely wanted to know who Anna Paquin’s Sookie Stackhouse would end up with. Would it be Bill the kindly vampire, Alcide the hunky werewolf, Eric the viking vamp or someone else entirely? I just wanted her to be happy, okay!
• There was always the idea in the back of my mind that it could get better. Yes, despite strong evidence to the contrary, I had faith in creator Alan Ball’s ability to eventually right the ship.

Well, I’m not at all happy to report that a few years after HBO mercifully put a stake through the show’s cold, dead heart, I still consider the 80 hours of True Blood I watched to have been a complete waste of time.

First and foremost, True Blood is one of those shows that absolutely refused to kill off its characters. So by the time season 7 came along, the cast was bloated with folks whose names I could barely remember. Like, who was that random vampire Arlene had a thing with in season 7, and where did he come from? I genuinely still don’t know.

The show did a great job of ruining all of its characters through its life cycle. Were you a fan of feisty young vampire Jessica? Too bad, because she literally murdered Andy’s fairy daughters. (Ugh, describing the plot of this show makes you sound like a toddler.) Did you enjoy Lafayette’s sassiness? He was a bit harder to enjoy after he screwed Jessica’s boyfriend basically just because he was high and bored.

Don’t even get me started on Tara, a sympathetic figure at first who was pulled in so many different narrative directions that when the show almost killed her off but turned her into a vampire at the last second, I genuinely wished they had mercifully ended the story of a character they had no idea what to do with. The show did eventually take her undead life, but in the least satisfying way possible, a.k.a. True Blood‘s calling card.

Then there was the time the show did actually pull the trigger and kill off Terry, a side character whose storylines were almost always peripheral to the main action. Then they spent HALF AN EPISODE ON HIS FUNERAL. Even when True Blood was willing to part ways with a member of its ensemble, it severely overestimated the audience’s investment in its poorly constructed characters.

Oh, and then there was the matter of the series finale. I’m going to spoil it for you now to save you the disappointment.

Remember my investment in Sookie, our poor mind-reading waitress fairy who just wanted to live a normal life full of happiness and love? And remember the three guys who the show spent six seasons convincing us were worthy of her heart?

SOOKIE ENDED UP WITH SOME RANDOM DUDE WHO WAS NEVER EVEN NAMED. This was after Alcide was unceremoniously murdered with some silver bullets, Bill had decided to kill himself for no apparent reason and Eric gave up on the idea of ever being with Sookie. It made no sense, and served as a giant middle finger to fans who thought they were supposed to care about any of these characters.

It turned out I wasn’t really interested in Sookie’s happiness. I was just using that as a barometer for whether the show actively disdained its audience as much as I thought it did. It turned out I was right.

Here’s my plea to anyone thinking about giving True Blood a shot: Don’t. It never lives up to the promise of its first two seasons, and its only notable legacy is introducing the world to Alexander Skarsgard and Joe Manganiello. Otherwise, it’s just a mess that made one creative blunder after another as it meandered toward one of the worst series finales in recent memory.

Happy anniversary, True Blood. Thank the TV gods you’re dead for good.