Oooooh! Vampires! One of the top three scary monsters that made me hide under my duvet as a kid, the other two being mummies and werewolves, I’ve never been that interested in reliving my childhood nightmares through the plethora of popular culture surrounding the vampire myth. Interview with a Vampire was rubbish, the Twilight books and movies are great if you’re under 16 but vomit-inducing teen rubbish if you’re not, and Blade was only good while you could see the hilarious Wesley Snipes prancing around in latex and dark glasses. In short, as far as I’m concerned there hasn’t been any decent vamp-related media since Bram Stoker.

True Blood (TV2, Mondays 22:35, repeated Fridays 23:45), on the other hand, is one of the best telly series of any kind, never mind those related to the supernatural, currently on our screens. In my humble opinion, this latest HBO import to YLE sits rather proudly alongside Sons of Anarchy as positive examples of American drama programming and is vastly superior to the mind-rotting piles of reality-show and cooking rubbish we’re served up the rest of the time.

True Blood is set in the fictitious Louisiana town of Bon Temps in a time where, thanks to the creation of synthetic blood, vampires have moved up the social ladder from scary boogiemen to fully-fledged citizens of the United States. The town seems filled with not only the fanged ones but also a bunch of people who, for reasons unexplained, have developed supernatural powers including telepathy and shapeshifting. If you haven’t seen the first few episodes here’s a quick recap: the telepath is a waitress at a restaurant owned by the shapeshifter. She (the telepath) meets a vampire who is pretty hunky for being 173 years old. They get it on. The telepath’s brother is suspected of a series of murders but we know he didn’t do it. I imagine the true villain will be revealed in the final episode. Some regular humans become addicted to vampire blood which causes them to off a bunch of our erstwhile creatures of the night, creating a certain friction, as you can imagine.

Pretty much par for the course as far as drama series are concerned, although this show is one of the more, shall we say, explicit ones to have come onto our screens recently. Naked bouncy bits, bad language and plenty of blood abound, so it’s not for children. It is, however, surprisingly well-acted and well-developed, character-wise, has won shed-loads of awards, and has rich (albeit over-the-top) storylines to boot. The show’s creator, Alan Ball, also created the excellent Six Feet Under so it’s fair to say he has something of an obsession with death (or the undead), and there’s more than enough in this show to satisfy even the most hardened deathaholic. Bizarrely I’ve seen this show listed as a ‘romantic drama’, and while there is some romance in it, don’t let that put you off, since it’s offset with plenty of drug addiction, murder, blood and lashings of ridiculous gravitas, and of course, vampires, to for once make the love story a catalyst for the more interesting stuff that happens. Sounds good to me. Plus, vampire sex is apparently really damn hot.

NICK BARLOW