Last week I made the prediction that the conclusion of the series-long storyline in “Dollhouse” wouldn’t make a bit of sense, but would at least show us a ton of cool moments along the way.

After seeing the next-to-last episode (“The Hollow Man”), I see that I was wrong on both counts. What I didn’t expect was that they’d come up with a resolution that actually kind of sort of made sense, at least in “Dollhouse” terms. What I did expect: everything else.

I kind of feel bad making fun of the series over a weak episode, considering it has had so many genuinely cool moments. But the team behind the series has managed to do this so well so many times in the past — getting screwed over by a network, facing cancellation, losing an actor or actress, having to rework the format of the entire series at the last minute — and ended up with something that wasn’t just serviceable, but memorable. This was just a string of predictable moments followed by the hero running away from an explosion. I can’t help but be disappointed by my own unreasonably high expectations.

Saying more requires spoilers for people who haven’t seen it, or people who aren’t as cynical as I am and enjoyed the penultimate episode just fine.
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I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction: the ending of “Dollhouse” is not going to make sense.

That’s not just a case of my continuing to moan about the ending to “Battlestar Galactica,” or an attempt to be too-cool-for-school, or an attempt to steel myself against the oncoming hand-waving. They’ve already guaranteed that it won’t make sense, with the last pre-Christmas-break episode. (Spoiler for “The Attic,” in case you haven’t seen it): While building up to the final epic showdown, they had the characters meet one of the masterminds of the whole evil plot that drives the series, and he says that he did computer projections of the technology they were using, and almost all of them resulted in the end of the world.

Now, the idea that you can store all of a person’s brain patterns on a hard drive and then imprint that onto another person — that’s ludicrous technology, but it’s the central premise of the series. It’s the thing that you just accept so that the story can go forward. You can even extend that to the whole idea of a Matrix of connected brains, fine, since it’s all part of the main concept. But a computer simulation that could’ve predicted all the twists and turns of this series would be impossible, even for science fiction. Too much of the series has been based on surprise reveals and unexpected developments. To claim that a computer could’ve seen it coming is enough of a stretch; claiming that there’s an evil mastermind orchestrating the whole thing is ridiculous.

And it’s not just that it doesn’t work on an anal-retentive nerdrage “there’s no sound in space!!” level; it’s that the whole series has been inherently reactionary. You don’t have to have been keeping up with the fansites and blogs or listening to the commentary tracks, either — just watch the series and you can see all the changes in direction. Both seasons kind of meander as if they were episodic television for a few episodes and then suddenly shift into overarching storyline mode. The end-of-the-world business, for example, was introduced in the season one post-apocalyptic finale “Epitaph One,” which was made because they didn’t know whether or not the series would get picked up for another year. And now the whole premise of the series finale is trying to get the two ends of the story to meet up. It’s based on the idea that the characters in the show can predict events even the creators of the show couldn’t see coming.

I’m just saying don’t expect it to all get tied up neatly. If I’m proven wrong, then I’ll gladly retract everything. They already did an unexpectedly great job of tying up one of the storylines in the most recent episode: the whole flashback about Bennett and Caroline not only made sense, it fit perfectly into the continuity and was a really well-done story. Their motivations were clear, they turned into real characters instead of just “hero” and “creepy scientist with a dead arm,” and it actually ended up being pretty poignant. And I’ll bet you anything that they had the completely story planned out from the moment of her first introduction, and that that’s what made all the difference.

But even if (when) it turns out that this whole thing doesn’t make sense, that’s not a bad thing. This series is the quintessential example of the sum of its parts being better than the whole. There have been plenty of fantastic moments — cooler than “Buffy” and “Firefly”, even, which I never would’ve expected — that remain cool even though they don’t all fit together neatly. And last week’s episode was so absolutely over-the-top ridiculous in its surprise developments (it seemed like there was one series-changing reveal for each commercial break) that it shouldn’t have worked at all. And yet it did.

But to explain why I’m skeptical it’ll work in future episodes, that’ll take bigger spoilers.
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I’ve already documented the horrible destructive powers I have over popular entertainment. I can bring about the end — not just abrupt cancellation, but slow, painful decline — of bands, TV series, and movie or book series just by liking them. To date I’m responsible for the break ups of The Pogues, the Pixies, and Soul Coughing, as well as the downfall of “Alias” and “Battlestar Galactica.” I suspect I had something to do with “Lost”‘s weak second season as well. So it was with some trepidation that I recently started to watch the first season of “Mad Men”, after hearing people rave about it for the past few years.

It turns out that I didn’t need to worry, because I watched the first three episodes last night, and I just can’t get into it. Now, fans of the show should be thrilled, since I’ve just guaranteed it’ll run as long as “Desperate Housewives,” “Gray’s Anatomy,” “American Idol,” and “Survivor,” just to name a few other long-running series that have managed to avoid my Galactus-like gaze. But you can’t tell someone “I don’t like that thing you’re a fan of” without its coming across as a challenge or an insult, so I feel obliged to explain.

I don’t care about any of the characters
The first episode is very well-structured, so by the end of it I felt that I knew what the situation was and what all the characters were about. I just didn’t care at all about what happened to them. Contrast it with “The Sopranos,” another series about a bunch of deeply flawed characters with no obvious “good guy:” I could see what the characters’ problems were, but I was intrigued about how deep the problems went and how they were going to resolve them. And I gave up on that series when the characters became more annoying than intriguing; why watch a show about people who just keep doing stupid or downright awful things and never learn from them?

Hello, My Name Is Sexually Manipulative Office Woman
Just after the first 45 minutes, I could make a fairly reasonable prediction of what each character’s story arc was going to be — and after checking out the Wikipedia version, I could see that my predictions were depressingly accurate. (To be fair, there’s been a good bit of cultural diffusion going on as well; even without watching a show this popular, I knew going in that infidelities and secret identities and babies were going to come into play, and that one of the characters grows a beard).

It’s not as bad as something like American Beauty, where each of the characters seems to be a cliche whose depth turns out to be a different but just as shallow cliche. But the characters still have their one note that they keep hitting, from Painfully Good-Looking Ad Exec Who’s Conflicted And Has a Mysterious Past, to Mousy Girl From the Steno Pool Who Doesn’t Want to Be Limited In Her Life Choices Just Because She’s a Woman, to Young Asshole and Closeted Gay Guy.

The Epcot Effect
Disney parks, especially Epcot Center, are my ideal vacation, but whenever I mention this to anyone I get the reaction “I’d rather go some place real.” I can see where they’re coming from, and the reasons I disagree would fill a whole other post. But I get the same feeling from “Mad Men.” The set design, costumes, and music choices are all just about perfect. But it’s not as if the 60s aren’t well-documented. If I want to watch a show about ad men in the 60s, why don’t I just watch “Bewitched”? If I want to see demeaning attitudes towards women, why not “I Dream of Jeannie?” If I want to see excessive smoking, there’s “The Twilight Zone.”

At least in those series, you get a better idea of what people really put an emphasis on. “Mad Men” feels to me like everything incidental about the 60s crammed together and made the focus. The pavilions in Epcot’s World Showcase aren’t really the countries, they’re the first thing that someone in America thinks of when he thinks of those countries, all crammed together in one small place. And “Mad Men” isn’t really the 60s, it’s how people in 2007 imagine the 60s: “hmm, people were sexist and racist and smoked a lot, and the clothes and the cars were really cool.”

Did I mention I’m casually racist?
And I don’t want to imply that the series is all just about the incidental stuff — clothes and cars and architecture and cigarettes. But when they deal with the deeper aspects of America in the 60s, it’s given the same treatment. Scenes feel to me like a TV biopic, where the screenwriter is desperately trying to cram a chapter’s worth of thematic material into one scene. The end result is that the ideas that would have resonated with me if they’d been mentioned casually or incidentally, I instead feel like I’ve been bludgeoned with. The characters don’t just smoke; the plot of the pilot episode is about selling cigarettes while knowing about the health risks. A woman can’t just be subtly reminded of the double standard of sexual promiscuity between men and woman; we have to see a Cronenberg-like scene with a leering gynecologist whose every single line of dialogue repeats the point. Closeted Gay Guy is completely established as such in his first scene, but we still have to see him in a strip club leering at other men in case anybody didn’t catch on. Again, kudos to them for not going with the most obvious cliches, but I still felt myself, in scene after scene, yelling at the screen “OKAY YES I GET IT LET’S MOVE ON.”

I’m still a 14-year-old boy in a 38-year-old man’s body
And yeah, it’s got to be acknowledged: I like plot-heavy stuff, and have never been a big fan of character studies. I’ve jokingly said that a show’s got to have robots, spaceships, time travel, or magic to hold my interest (and Tony Soprano’s dreams were just supernatural enough to keep me occupied), but what I really want is something that keeps everything moving. Again, all of the stuff in the first few episodes of “Mad Men” felt like incidental stuff made focus: these characters’ quirks might interest me if they were doing something more interesting than being 60s people.

So I can definitely understand what other people see in the series. Like I said, the music and the costumes and the production design are just outstanding. And I’ll gladly watch an hour of “The Clone Wars” no matter how weak the story, just as an excuse to see cool sets and costumes. (And a huge part of why “Lost” is such a big deal for me is that whole early 70s aesthetic that they get just right). There’s just not much else there for someone like me. So all of you “Mad Men” fans can breathe a sigh of relief; it’s probably going to run for a decade at least.

Hulu’s cool because not only do the clips go away after some unpredictable time period, but you get to sit through 30 seconds of advertising before you watch a clip advertising a show.

My picks for the best stuff on television hasn’t really changed since the last time I wrote about them. But I have actually swear-to-god-I’m-not-making-this-up had a couple of people ask me about the series. So here’s my favorite TV of this year, plus my favorite episode of each one to get you started (with a link if it’s still available online).

1. Community
It’s still the funniest series on TV. “Introduction to Statistics” is the best one. (It’s the “Mexican Halloween” episode, which is offensive to those of us who know of “Mexican Halloween” as a sexual position).

2. The Venture Brothers
I’ll go ahead and say it: season three kind of left me cold, but everything about this series is too damn cool not to love. Season 4 has been working a lot better for me, even if it feels like it’s kind of coasting. One of the best things about the series is that they’re going full-on with their over-complicated continuity and their obscure references, without feeling the need to pander and over-explain everything. Best episode this season is probably “Handsome Ransom,” but I can’t find the whole episode online anywhere.

3. 30 Rock
The problem I keep having with “30 Rock” is that the episodes are hilarious while they’re on, but completely evaporate as soon as they’re over. Still, “Dealbreakers Talk Show #0001″ had enough laugh-out-loud moments crammed into 5 minutes to last a whole season.

4. Psych
Nine parts stream-of-consciousness 80s references and in-jokes to one part detective show. Best episode you can get online at the moment: “Let’s Get Hairy”. Making an episode about werewolves and casting David Naughton is quintessential “Psych.”

5. Batman: The Brave and the Bold
Can’t find any great episodes online, but the opening of this “sneak peek” clip explains everything about the appeal of the show: it doesn’t take itself seriously but rarely lapses into pure camp, and it’s got a style that hits exactly the right balance between the Silver Age comics and late 60s/early 70s animated series.

For eight years, “Monk” has been the “old reliable” of television. It was always “safe” enough to watch with my parents, but still interesting enough to watch alone. It was never really “appointment” TV, but if I made time to watch an episode, I could be pretty much guaranteed of an hour of well-made television. More often than not, the cases had at least one clever twist or revelation, and when they didn’t, there’d always be at least one funny set piece. It could go on for season after season without being completely weighed down by formula, and it could weather gimmick episodes and stunt casting and still keep its integrity.

But still: the formula had gotten pretty apparent, and I’d stopped watching a few years ago. It wasn’t until they announced the series was ending that I really started to pay attention again. And it’s pretty remarkable what they managed to accomplish. Take the premise: combine Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot into one character, put him in modern-day San Francisco (or at least as close as Vancouver allows), with Dr. Watson/Hastings played by a caustic nurse from New Jersey and Chief Inspector Japp played by the guy from Silence of the Lambs. Give him all of Holmes’s arrogance and Poirot’s peculiarities, but say they’re because of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Because of a domineering mother and an absentee father. Actually, make that crippling OCD, which caused him to lose his job and become a social outcast. Caused by the murder of his wife by a car bomb, which caused him to have a complete mental breakdown requiring years of constant therapy.

Oh yeah, and it’s a comedy series.

And yet somehow, they did it. For eight years, two assistants, two therapists, constant flashbacks, and three Dale the Whales. And they managed to almost always strike the right balance — it could’ve easily gone too far into hopelessly bleak or maudlin territory, or too far into standard police procedural territory, or too far into pointing and laughing at the wacky guy with mental problems. The reason it worked as well as it did is not because they avoided any of the extremes, but because they remembered to include all three extremes. Here was a series that could have an episode played completely for laughs, but still had an ending that felt like a punch in the gut. Or an episode about the series’s “mythology” that incidentally has Monk solving multiple homicides.

Sometimes they’d let the comedy bits get too broad, at the expense of everything else. And some of the actual cases were slight at best — but then, this was always first and foremost a show about characters, disguised as a police procedural. So when it presented an episode that was a little too formulaic or a bit too contrived, it became easy to lose sight of the show’s greatest achievement, taking black comedy and making it mainstream. They never wore their edginess on their sleeve, but it was still always there, the show’s big message: really horrible stuff frequently happens to good people.

So I really didn’t know what to expect going into the series finale. Season 8 hasn’t been an overblown season-long event, but a series of standalone cases. There’s been a recurring theme in all the episodes: that of Monk gradually getting over his phobias and learning to adjust to “normal” life. But they saved the final revelations about Trudy’s case until the final two parter, and it could’ve gone in any number of directions. This is a formula-driven crime procedural, where Monk always solves the case… it’s got to have a happy ending, right? But then again, this is a series that has never really pulled its punches: it’s a comedy series where the main character is a profoundly broken and miserable man who constantly wishes for death. The people involved with the show wouldn’t say more than that the ending was “satisfying.” If Monk died and was reunited with Trudy, would that be “satisfying?”

Considering that they had so many options, I’m impressed that they came up with a finale that was damn near perfect.

The rest of this has spoilers in case you haven’t seen the last two episodes, or you didn’t have the ending already ruined by Entertainment Weekly.
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One of the best things available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service is Jim Henson’s “The Storyteller” series and its second series, “The Storyteller: Greek Myths”. They were two joint American/British productions made in 1988 and 1990, and they’re both wonderful.

It’s entirely possible that I was aware of them when they were coming out, but I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them then, anyway. I would’ve lumped it in with all of the other non-Muppet releases from the Henson company, like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal: clearly full-to-bursting with imagination and craftsmanship, but they always left me cold. But where “The Storyteller” is different is that the stories truly are the focus; they don’t feel like just excuses to string together a bunch of creatures and effects.

Another key difference is that the series was developed by Anthony Minghella, and he wrote the screenplays for the first series, based on traditional folk tales. And the scripts are wonderful; he gets the cadence of the language and the spirit of the stories exactly right. (The title of this post is a perfect line from “The Three Ravens.”) It took a few episodes for the fairy tales to grow on me, but each one I’ve seen makes me appreciate the others more.

I started with the Greek Myths series, which is still my favorite. These are brilliantly narrated by Michael Gambon, and the whole production is skewed to that perfect level of non-quite-dark but not-quite-happy, not-quite-adult but not-quite-childish that the Henson company has (almost) always done so well. Even though I’d heard most of the stories before, they all added aspects of the myth I hadn’t heard, or presented them with such a level of drama that it felt as if the stories were being told for the first time. (I hadn’t heard any of the fairy tales stories before, so they were all new to me).

There’s more info about the series at Muppet Wiki and Wikipedia; I’d say just watch them and enjoy the feeling that you’ve unearthed a classic you had no idea existed. I was going to say that people just don’t make television like this anymore, but it’s actually worse than that: I can’t even imagine who would even have the idea to make something like this these days.

One of the side effects of weaning myself off live TV (mostly) is that I don’t have a good sense of what’s popular anymore. It’s been years since I hit my post-college levels of watching TV, but even then I had some vague sense of what was going on outside my peripheral vision. Lately, there’ve been whole series that qualify as pop culture phenomena, and I don’t know a thing about them — there’s apparently a lot of dancing and hospitals involved, and entire networks devoted to twenty-year-olds-playing-teenagers shows that as far as I’m concerned, might as well be interchangeable.

So the closest I can come to feeling like I’m plugged in is to tell everybody what I’m watching, and then see whether or not I’m in the popular crowd after the fact. Besides, I can’t really talk around the water cooler at work, because I only drink Coke.

New

Community
This is the funniest show on television now, and I never would’ve seen that coming. What little marketing I did see made it seem like a completely predictable big network sitcom. Smarmy lawyer guy has to go to community college, falls in love with another student while making his way through wacky hijinx and jokes about how small and bad the school is. And it pains me to say it, considering that I spent much of the 80s and 90s able to quote Fletch in its entirety, but it’s been a long time since Chevy Chase has been funny in anything.

But he’s funny here, because the cast really is an ensemble. And they know exactly what you’re expecting to see at all times, which lets them start out with completely predictable sitcom setups, and then take the idea off in some weird direction. They don’t let it settle into a tired fish-out-of-water routine, because they spend at least as much time making fun of Joel McHale’s character as everybody else’s; nobody in the cast is “the normal one.” And they somehow manage to defuse the will-they-or-won’t-they? gimmick while still milking it for all it’s worth. Best of all, it’s got Ken Jeong as Señor Chang, and I’ve been a fan of his ever since I saw the “What’s It Gonna Be?” video [probably not safe for work].

FlashForward
This one is so blatantly targeted at “Lost” fans, and it’s trying so hard that I’ve been trying to meet it halfway. But it’s been rough going. So far, it’s been in solid B+ territory: nothing offensive, just enough intrigue to keep you going, but none of the sudden bursts of imagination of something like, well, “Lost.” (Sorry, you can’t ride on one series’s coattails, even to the point of casting two of the stars of that series, without inviting comparisons). But I’ll keep up with it, if only because they keep doing stuff like casting Gina Torres and Gabrielle Union in the same episode.

V
“V” in 2009 is, well, pretty much exactly that. I’m not sure who this is targeted at, exactly — it’s not different enough to surprise fans of the old series, and it doesn’t seem novel enough to bring in newcomers. The old series, as cheesy as it was, still had these images that were completely iconic, and the closest the new version has been able to come is with the enormous image of Morena Baccarin hovering over the city: neat, but it’s not even in the same league as eating a live mouse. (I accidentally spoiled the identity of the Visitors to a co-worker today, just because I assumed that the old series was common knowledge at this point). But as I’ve said before, I’ll watch Elizabeth Mitchell in anything, because she’s awesome. I’m just going to be disappointed until they get to the half-human/half-Visitor baby.

Batman: The Brave & The Bold
Technically, this is still in its first year, so I guess it counts as “new.” I’m still not crazy about Deidrich Bader as Batman, but everything else is gold. Everything’s huge and full of Silver Age wackiness, while including all the new stuff from the DC Universe, like the new Blue Beetle. They do a pretty good job of striking a balance between comic book and comedy; although it errs on the side of the cheap gag a little too often, it’s great seeing a comic book series that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Returning

The Venture Brothers
It’s all genius, and I love that they don’t give a damn how impenetrable it is, and they refuse to pander. They still include casual throwaway gags that lesser series would build entire episodes around. They started to lose me a little bit in Season 3, but so far I’ve loved everything in Season 4. Even without Brock.

How I Met Your Mother
I think I finally figured out why this show works for me: it’s because they’re not afraid to be corny, and they’re not afraid to make any of the characters look stupid. Even their gimmicks work; I’m actually eager to see Robin’s Canadian Variety Show with Alan Thicke now.

30 Rock
It’s still got the highest joke-per-minute ratio of any sitcom, but it does feel a little bit like they’re treading water now, or they’re getting a little too wry for their own good. Plus, Stone Mountain, Georgia isn’t a farm town; it’s a suburb of Atlanta. There’s a Best Buy and everything, and no chuckle hut.

Monk
The closer I get to being 40, the more I wonder if “Monk” has become my version of “Matlock.” But it’s the last season, and they’re doing a respectable job of tying everything up. I’d been hoping for a season-long investigation into Trudy’s murder, but instead they’re just showing Monk gradually becoming more “normal” and independent. Which is probably a better idea.

Psych
It’s always been Monk’s goofy kid brother on the USA network, but it’s grown on me. What makes it work is that they’re just completely shameless with the goofiness; it’s not a mystery show with comic relief, but a stream-of-consciousness that tosses in a mystery every once in a while.

Dollhouse
It’s been cancelled now, which should surprise no one. And truth be told, I’m skeptical that the concept had that much life left in it anyway. The first season was sabotaged by its initial batch of really weak episodes, but around episode five or six, it picked up and turned into something pretty cool. (Still: I’ve got all of the season 2 episodes on season pass, and I haven’t felt compelled to actually watch them). I still say it would’ve made a better mini-series than an ongoing one.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
I feel the need to explain this one. It’s a shame that you can’t talk about this show without qualifying it with “It’s better than you’d think,” because it’s clear that a lot more time and attention are devoted to this series than to most television. But still, the first season had way too much Jar Jar, which is to say: some.

Almost all of my allegiance to Star Wars was beaten out of me by three years at LucasArts and the prequels, but I don’t know if you can ever get rid of it completely. And I think back to when I was around 9 or 10 and had all of the Ralph McQuarrie concept art hanging up on the walls of my bedroom, and I’d try to imagine a story based around each one, all the cool stuff the characters must do in between movies. “The Clone Wars” series is basically just that: the stories are light, the characters are kind of shallow, and the whole thing seems to pander and underestimate kids’ intelligence a little bit too much. (Plus for some reason, Obi-Wan’s voice actor makes him sound unnervingly fey and suggestive, which is off-putting). But for 25 minutes each week, you get to see spaceships and aliens flying around beautifully-realized alien planets that look like concept paintings brought to life. I also like that they picked a distinctive art style and just ran with it.

The first disc of the HBO Series “True Blood” showed up in my Netflix queue while I was still trying to figure out the Near Dark conundrum, so apparently I was on a vampire kick a few months ago.

The series is in its second season, and I’d been avoiding it because nothing I’d heard interested me all that much. First I heard of it was from that enormous viral campaign HBO launched, but it backfired for me because their teaser ads were so ubiquitous that I actively avoided them. I got more of an idea of the premise — southern gothic on premium cable — but it sounded like Twilight for middle-aged women, so I wasn’t interested. The first reviews started coming in, but they weren’t all that positive, so I didn’t think much of it. My friend Rain liked it enough to read the books the series was based on, but she didn’t seem that impressed either, so I didn’t bother.

I eventually heard more of the premise — the Japanese invent a synthetic blood that finally allows vampires to “come out of the coffin” and blend with mainstream society — and I heard that Alan Ball was involved, so I figured it was going to be a civil rights parable with analogies about race relations and gay rights and religion in politics. But I hated American Beauty and could never get into “Six Feet Under,” so I didn’t bother. I knew it was on HBO, so I figured it was going to be full of gratuitous sex and violence to justify the premium cable charges, and I read an interview with Anna Paquin where she says she didn’t mind the nudity because her outfits were skimpy throughout the show and she was raised in an environment that just wasn’t hung up about nudity.

So I moved it to the top of my Netflix queue and watched the first couple of episodes back to back in one night. And it really is kind of like Twilight for middle-aged women, and there is a ton of over-the-top sex and violence, and it is indeed full of not-particularly-subtle analogies to the gay rights movement and race relations and religion in politics. And it’s soapy, and silly, and pretty ridiculous, and frankly comes across as being a little stilted and clumsy. You get the sense that they’ve got some clever ideas that aren’t quite coming together.

But it’s plotted really well, with murder mystery intrigue tying the scenes together and a huge cliffhanger at the end of each episode. So even if you’re watching it just to make fun of it, you get sucked in. (Anybody interested in how to do episodic storytelling should be watching this series and taking notes). And besides, all the country roads and cemeteries and lemonade and old houses and roadhouse bars set back in the woods fill me with fake nostalgia. (I’ve never been to Louisiana, and I’ve spent a total of about a week in Savannah, but you still just have to show me one shot of a swamp or Spanish moss and that’s how I want to remember it.)

Then, somewhere around episode five or so, the series kind of transforms. Either they’d finally gotten the set-up out of the way, or they got the hang of how to write for all the characters, or the series becomes self-aware and takes advantage of how silly it is, or I just finally stopped putting up a resistance. Whatever the case, the show goes from so-bad-it’s-good to just plain good. The plot builds up a momentum that stumbles a couple of times but never completely. They toss in more supernatural complications that still manage to feel new and creepy in a story that already takes vampires as commonplace. They keep a mix of comedy and southern-gothic-romance and horror going on without its ever going too far into melodrama or look-how-clever-we-are meta-commentary (like “Buffy” would sometimes do).

They take all the stock rural-Southern-town stereotypes and put just enough of an edge on them that they’re still interesting to watch. And they throw in an amazing supporting cast: Lizzy Caplan was the best thing in Cloverfield, and she’s great here as a spin on the tiresome northeastern over-priveleged new-age college drop-out. And Stephen Root is one of my favorite people, so he doesn’t even have to be in something good for me to like it. But his first appearance is my favorite part of the first season: it’s a scene that’s really sad, funny, suspenseful, and creepy all at once, and I thought it crossed the “safe” line into something truly original. When Michelle Forbes pops up at the end, it seems gratuitous because I’m already hooked: she’s great in just about anything, usually better than her material, and she’s got a particularly interesting character in season 2.

Speaking of great scenes and crossing lines, the cold open for the ninth episode, which is the first time we see what happens when a vampire gets staked, may be the best opening for any episode of television. It takes it from a soapy southern-gothic romance TV series into over-the-top Sam Raimi territory, and the whole thing might as well have “ONLY ON HBO” superimposed on it. That was when I realized the show isn’t just repeating a bunch of familiar stuff, but is pulling from a ton of influences and is committed to throwing in as many of them as it can.

Usually the accents are the thing that kills TV shows and movies set in the south for me. In “True Blood,” the accents are all over the place, which is understandable because the cast is from all over the place. Looking on IMDB turns up New Zealand, England, Australia, and everywhere in the US north of the Mason Dixon. But there’s nothing really grating — most of them you’d never suspect a thing — and the ones that do feel a little “off” are given a story explanation: Bill’s supposed to be a Civil War veteran, so you can forgive the “Sook-ay”; and Sookie’s played by Anna Paquin doing her Rogue-from-X-Men thing, which you can accept because holy damnation is she pretty.

I was thinking that my only big complaint was that I’d already figured out the murder mystery by around the fourth or fifth episode. But even that isn’t a problem, because the murder mystery is only a fraction of all the plotting going on, and it’s basically just a vehicle for all of the relationship-driven stuff. Not just the big romantic relationship, but the interactions of a bunch of badly damaged characters trying to make sense of their lives in a world where religion doesn’t work as well as it used to. And even that makes it sound more pretentious than it really is — it seems like it matured into a series that does have more depth than just “Twilight for middle-aged women,” but it’s also confident enough that it doesn’t have to “mean” anything all the time. It’s not afraid to be soapy, silly, and pretty ridiculous.

Most surprising to me is that they can have a series with this much gore, profanity, violence, nudity, sex, drug use, and of course, blood, and it doesn’t come across as completely gratuitous. I can remember being a kid and sneaking into the living room to watch “The Hitchhiker”, and even at that age it was boring. They were trying to make “The Twilight Zone” that would sell HBO subscriptions: run-of-the-mill horror episodes that would always have one sex scene (always filmed exactly the same way) clumsily inserted (so to speak) at some point in the story.

Even in well-made shows like “Rome” and “The Sopranos,” the sex and violence is there more for authenticity’s sake than for being essential to the series: being a mobster or an ancient Roman means you’re going to hear a lot of swearing and see a lot of blood and nudity. But in “True Blood,” it’s used more for contrast. When your heroine who never swears suddenly lets out the f-bomb, you’re reminded it’s a big deal. When you’ve got a character who’s angry and damaged, you’ve got to have her constantly (and inappropriately) swearing to show how far off “normal” she is. When you discover a murder scene that’s supposed to be a horrifying moment, in a series filled with blood, you’ve got to have blood on the walls and floor to convey the real impact of it.

And no offense to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but a story about sexual awakening that’s been edited for network TV just doesn’t have the same weight: it becomes Twilight-ized into teen girl romance fantasy. The core romance of “True Blood” doesn’t interest me as much as all of the other stuff, but the thing that keeps it from being completely tedious is that they’re able to make it genuinely romantic and passionate. And I don’t think they would be able to do that as well if they couldn’t show other people having dirty, raunchy, meaningless sex. Even if they weren’t going for the Tennessee Williams angle, where it’s so hot in the south that people have no choice but to hump constantly.

Plus, a show with this much sex and violence doesn’t really need to be written as well as it is. I already mentioned that the plotting is insidiously addictive, but the dialogue is sharp, too. I’ve been surprised by how many times I laugh out loud. A gay nerd vampire tells his lover, “I always look forward to Monday nights. First ‘Heroes,’ and then you.” A jealous jock type tells Jason, “You think you can walk on water, don’t you?” and he cockily replies, “Uh, I’m pretty sure that was Moses.” An over-excitable fang-banger gets some rags to dress a gunshot wound and then starts screaming hysterically when she realizes they’re dirty. There are plenty of surprisingly clever moments, surprising when so much of the show is as subtle as a brick through a window. (Which is itself another line from the show).

There are still plenty of ways it can go wrong — especially now that I like it, and that’s usually the kiss of death for good TV series — but for now, it’s happily jumping back and forth over all kinds of lines and changing things up the moment it starts to get too predictable. For now, I’m perfectly happy to abandon my skepticism and let the series do whatever it wants, and treat it like Twilight for middle-aged men.