True Blood’s Angela Robinson talks to AfterEllen about her experiences working on True Blood since she became one of the writers starting with Season 5. Coming into a show in mid run (season 5), must have been difficult, butAngela seemed to fit in just fine and now as an executive producer she has wrote Season 7′s pilot episode. Below she answers questions about that episode and about the fate of Tara and more.
AfterEllen.com: So I wanted to talk to you mostly about True Blood, because I finished watching and recapping last week’s episode and I had a lot of questions. So I was like, “Why don’t I just ask those questions to the woman who wrote the episode?”
Angela Robinson: Sure!
AE: So the first question is—and you can be honest because it’s just between you and me and the internet—is Tara really dead?
AR: She is really dead, yes. She had the true death.
AE: WHY? (laughter) OK, a better way to phrase that is: In the writers’ room was the decision, “We need to kill someone to show that the stakes are really high going into the last season” or “We need to kill off Tara just because her time has come?
AR: In the writers’ room we had a lot of discussion about the final season and how to bring the show to an end. It’s the seventh year of this incredible TV show and we wanted, collectively, to reign in the show a little bit and bring it back close to season one in its intimacy. [And we wanted] to focus more on the characters and their relationships to each other. As the seasons went on there were a lot of werewolf storylines and fairies, and it took us all sorts of places, which was really exciting. But for the final season we wanted to bring it back to Bon Temps and tell stories about the town and about Sookie’s relationship to the town. And this put Sookie back in the forefront of the story. And when there’s so much death that happens all the time in the series, we wanted to dramatically figure out a way where death mattered. At the end of last season, we were contemplating “life matters.”
AE: Yeah, that was my favorite episode.
AR: There’s been so much death on the show that we felt that the stakes of anybody dying were getting lost, like it wasn’t feeling meaningful anymore. So we focused on Terry’s death and the idea that life mattered, and that each individual life matters. So in a simplistic way [we wanted] to raise the stakes but it wasn’t really about raising the stakes. It was about wanting to bring home the impact, something that would impact the characters, to say that this is real, and that what’s happening in this final season is going to affect people. And we needed it to affect all of our characters. Tara had always been the closest to Sookie and then she’s become a vampire…but it’s not like we wanted to kill Tara. Nobody wanted to kill Tara, we just felt that there wasn’t anybody else who would impact the story in a way where the characters could even feel anything. Because there’s been so much death. But Tara’s death affects Sookie and Jason and Sam and Pam and Eric, so in our discussions, we felt that in order to tell the story we wanted to tell the final season we needed a character that would refocus the stakes and would matter. And if we killed a character who wasn’t as integral to the show, it just wouldn’t matter. Like, you wouldn’t feel anything, but also it wouldn’t motivate our other characters to act the way we needed them too. It was actually because she’s so integral to the show that we made the choice to kill her.
AE: Well, I understand that choice and I’ve seen that—not to minimize it—but that trick of killing a character to change the dynamic and change the story but it seemed like everyone’s reactions to her death were sort of numbed out. Lafayette had this whole thing about “God, at this point I don’t have anything left to feel.” And the fact that it happened off-screen was also just confusing for people who were like, “Is she really dead?”
AR: I understand. Those were all choices we made collectively in the writers’ room because, tonally, the idea for this season was a little darker. Actually, we spent so much time on the values of “life matters” and Terry’s death in the last season, that we decided to play it so it was brutal and like from Sookie’s perspective, because she didn’t experience it. I thought a lot about people who are in war. Because the strange thing about writing for True Blood is it’s this fun show about vampires but you have to make it emotionally true, what the characters are going through. And they’re under attack ALL THE TIME and brutalized. And, in the context of this one really dark night, they all question what to do with your grief. So the characters talk about how they’re not able to feel any more; even Jason articulates, “Why are we going on with our lives?”
On this show, you have to look a lot of different ways at the same subject: death. The show is all about death. So I feel like in essence that was kind of the point, in that it was brutal and unsatisfying and abrupt. But that story is not finished. Inasmuch as we will address the fact that she wasn’t fully mourned later in the season. That’s part of the story. But I am a huge fan of the show and (laughing) I always hate it when writers do that, but it was one of the choices and it was intentional. I understand that people have feelings about it and if I were watching the show I would too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing from our point of view, but I might actually be really pissed off. But for the story of this season we felt it was appropriate.
And just informationally, we did shoot a scene where Pam reacted to Tara dying. She was in Morocco and weeping in a bathroom where she felt it. She was grieving for her. We did write that, but when it was all put together the scene felt weird and out of place because Pam was on the other side of the world, so it didn’t make it into the final cut.
AE: I hope that gets released on DVD because I would love to see that scene.
AR: It’s a brief scene, but there was a lot of discussion about how Pam would feel her death and react to it. Originally there was a scene where she reacted, so when she talks about “Everything I touch dies, everyone I love leaves,” in the draft of the episode she reacted to Tara dying in the bathroom and then later went and played Russian roulette. And the scene with the daughter where she goes and gets information about where Eric is was originally in episode two and was moved up to episode one so that we could accelerate her search storyline.
AE: Well, you know AfterEllen…
AR: Yeah, I read it all the time! You guys are my favorite!
AE: So the people I write for probably have some of the strongest feelings and reactions about Tara’s death and about the gay storylines.
AR: Of course. Even in the writers’ room, I was like “I’m gonna have to answer for this.”
(Laughter)
AE: Well yeah, you’ve always been very outspoken about representation so I know that Tara meant something to you and to all of us, so it’s not just about the story. Also the same day—which is such a double whammy—or the day after the most recent episode aired, the actress who plays Adilyn, Bailey Noble, did an interview where she said that Adilyn was originally written as a lesbian but that was scrapped. And in that episode, she had some very intense chemistry with Deborah Ann Woll. Although I think she could have chemistry with an empty room. So do you want to address that at all?
AR: That’s really interesting. Because I am always looking out for the lesbian fans, because I am one of them. So on the Tara side, I came on in Season 5, but one of the things I really tried to do—I didn’t introduce it but it was important to me—the Tara and Jessica friendship. I would try to highlight it in my episodes and give more time to those relationships, even just the female friendships. In the very early initial talks, there were talks of whether Adilyn might be a lesbian, but we decided to go in a different direction.
Read the complete article at After Ellen.com.
