HBO’s vampire drama returns for a fourth season Sunday, and Executive Producer Alan Ball teases what’s to come. “I don’t even remember Season 3,” Ball says.
In the heart of West Hollywood, a homey bungalow serves as the office for Alan Ball, the executive producer of HBO’s addictive vampire series True Blood, which returns for a fourth season on Sunday. But the show’s resident horrors are nowhere to be found here: a dog bed (belonging to Ball’s beloved French bulldog, Gigi) sits in the entryway, and the place—reputedly once the office of Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn—feels miles away from the Louisiana-set blood-soaked drama.
That is, until Ball—who won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for American Beauty and an Emmy for directing his previous HBO show, Six Feet Under—points out a stack of books about the cult of Dionysus, leftovers from the show’s breakout second season, sitting on his nearby desk. Just like that, we’re headed back into Bon Temps territory.
“Bon Temps is for supernaturals what Florida is for serial killers,” said Ball, chuckling. “They just all end up going there.”
True Blood, based on the bestselling novels by Charlaine Harris, revolves around telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and the vampires and other supernatural entities that call this sleepy Louisiana burg home. While the show wasn’t an immediate ratings smash for the pay cable network, it quickly sunk its teeth into the cultural zeitgeist, attracting an average of 13 million viewers per episode in its third season and landing its stars—including Paquin, her real-life husband Stephen Moyer, and Swedish heartthrob Alexander Skarsgård—on magazine covers around the world.
But the sex-and-violence-laden drama isn’t all neck-biting and werepanthers. True Blood is itself a shifting metaphor for oppressed minorities in America, with vampires and other supernaturals standing in at times for gay people, blacks, or a slew of other groups. And it examines the onus of humanity within each of the characters, weighing their moral choices and the way they choose to live their lives. It is, alternately, a provocative and pensive soap opera that puts the gothic in Southern Gothic.
“I always choose to look, as much as one can, at the supernatural not being something that exists outside of nature, but a deeper, fundamental heart of nature that perhaps humans… have lost touch with,” said Ball. “It’s a more primal thing than perhaps we are attuned to in our modern, self-aware way of life.”
Ball is not one for spoilers, but he is being even more adamant this year that details about the upcoming season aren’t revealed to viewers. What is fair game is that the supernatural elements within Season 4 of True Blood will include faeries and witches, the latter introduced in a storyline that strips Skarsgård’s vampire sheriff Eric Northman of his memory, and explores the fluid nature of identity and the way in which power corrupts.
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