For my fangalicious Fang-A-Thon 2012 – Day 4 post, I figured I would take a deeper look inside the casting for True Blood. These are my thoughts on all of the casting calls we seem to get every year. Feel free to share your thoughts after you’ve finished reading!
As you know, here at Eric & Sookie Lovers – we keep you pretty much informed on the latest casting calls. Mostly, we do this to inform you on what’s going to happen, and to speculate – especially because (as you well know) True Blood keeps pretty tight-lipped on upcoming spoilers. Other than the promos they choose to share…we pretty much have nothing that tells us what’s going to happen during the season. Sure, they do share spoilers with Michael Ausiello from TVLine.com and Kristin Dos Santos from E! Online, naturally, but those are few and far between and on their time…not ours. (At least during the off-season.) We love being spoiled as much as possible and as often as possible.
Sorry if this comes off sounding like a rant, because it’s really not. I’m just sharing my thoughts on it.
It seems like every year, we have an astronomical amount of casting calls released for each episode of True Blood. I think it’s roughly an average of four characters/episode, but don’t quote me on that, because I don’t really know. I’m just basing this off what I remember reading in each one. But it seems like True Blood is worse than other shows, when it comes to this. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t follow other shows as closely, so I miss them…but it seems like every couple of weeks, there’s a new casting call out there.
We seem to have many roles filled, for only a few minutes of screen-time and/or a brief glimpse of them on the show. It hardly seems worth it, when all is said and done. Sure, True Blood needs these roles to be able to tell a story effectively – but as you are aware…storytelling isn’t one of True Blood’s strengths. (Continuity errors is a big issue with them, but I’m not going to get into details about that in here.)
There is some good – which comes with posting casting calls like these each year.
- It keeps actors employed in an unstable market and even worse economy. I can’t really fault them for this.
- It keeps us informed as to what to expect (somewhat) in the season, example: spoilers.
- Usually tells us who is directing and writing the episode, as well as the episode title.
- We need a cast to be able to portray the stories throughout the season. Characters get killed off, and have to be replaced, and introduced.
But we also have a lot of bad too.
- Too many smaller roles, which could almost be considered ‘glorified extras’.
- Too many characters not based on the books, but then again…since this is basically Alan Ball’s fanfiction, it’s not really surprising to us.
- Have you ever heard of the phrase, “less is more”? This definitely does NOT fall under that. If they have to show X amount of people, it doesn’t leave very much room for the true stars of the show. As you know, they are the ones we want to see the most. Why would we want to waste our time watching nobodies (no offense to them)? But I often hear complaints about “not enough Eric”, “too much ‘filler’”, blah, blah, blah. I’m not disagreeing with you, I agree 100% completely. The fans (us) want to see the characters WE care about. Not characters we have no invested interest in watching.
- Have you ever had too much dumped on you, and it left you feel disorganized, lost and confused? Having too many characters leads to having to squeeze them all in – in a show with a huge cast already. Why do they have the ‘need’ to create other characters in a story, when they have enough characters as it is? If they can’t work it in – due to characters who have no relation to the story, then they MUST get rid of these “added burdens” by either killing them off or just drop them altogether.
- This all leads to the viewers’ confusion and that eventually leads to their loss of interest. This eventually leads to the decline in ratings, which leads to the show’s cancellation. If you can’t understand what’s going on, you’re not going to find enjoyment in it, are you?
I could probably go on and on about this…but I thought I’d put this out there for you to read and to (at least) think about it. But this does make me think of the famous advertising slogan…“billions and billions served” – but in this case, it’s more like what is shown in the image below. LOL
Sooooo…what do you think? How much is too much? Is there some kind of quota the show has to maintain? Is there a reason why True Blood seems to have more casting calls than other shows? Should there be some kind of limit as to how many characters the show should have?
Feel free to share your thoughts and voice your opinions below!
