Respect Authority

With the first season of HBO’s True Blood about to end, it’s high time I said what’s been on my mind for the last eight or so weeks: Anna Paquin is a terrible actress.

It took a solid five episodes for True Blood to become a must-watch show for me. Although I was enthralled with the plot from the beginning — it’s set in modern-day Louisiana except vampires have revealed themselves to society demanding equal treatment and after the invention of synthetic blood that they can drink to ‘mainstream’ amongst humans — the show’s execution is uniquely stylized, much as all HBO shows are, and it took a handful of episodes to really understand and accept True Blood’s eccentricities.

Once I did, I became immediately willing to accept any number of ludicrous plot points — vampires, shape shifters, non-racist Southerners — but was perpetually distracted by the show’s lead character, the ever-innocent and earnest Sookie Stackhouse, who falls in love with a vampire, and by the way, can read minds.

While I will readily admit the character itself is exceedingly bizarre, I refuse to believe that a lot of Sookie’s complete and utter weirdness doesn’t come from the fact that Anna Paquin perceives and acts the character the way one would play an impetuous 10-year-old. In addition to the fact that she prances around the deep South in clothes as minuscule and tight, yet oddly innocent, as someone fifteen years her junior, Sookie/Anna also speaks like someone who never quite learned the difference between a question and a statement. Add to that a touch of “Well, I’m a damn strong woman, garsh darnit!” bravado, and you’ve got Sookie — too innocent to be as tolerant of disaster as she is, but too prone to disaster to be considered innocent.

Some part of me thinks after just a few episodes of seeing 40+ minutes of the gap between Anna Paquin’s front teeth, True Blood’s producers drew the same conclusion and began to focus more on the show’s incredible side characters. It was at this point that True Blood became not only watchable but amazing — which is consequently around the time the show started involving violence, death and sex. Lots and lots of sex. Still, I can’t help but think that the sudden reduction in Sookie face-time means someone in the HBO offices picked up on the fact that her acting makes me want to stab a stake through my own heart.

I suppose at this point they couldn’t exactly kill her off, primarily because Sookie is the star of the eight books the show is based on. But truth to the books aside …I really don’t think too many people would mind.