True Blood’s stalwarts are visibly tiring
Watching True Blood self-immolate is both a cultural exercise in what can go wrong with a once-promising TV drama and a psychological case study of how much even the most obsessive fan will tolerate before realizing that what they loved so much is not what it once was.
As True Blood prepares to unveil its sixth season Sunday, with an episode perhaps unfortunately titled Radioactive, even True stalwarts Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer appear to be visibly tiring of the increasingly absurd, nonsensical parade of mayhem.
Paquin in particular seems to have lost the energy that, in True Blood’s leaner, earlier years, earned her a best actress Emmy nomination.
In last week’s episode, Life Matters, which one online fan site recapped under the heading, “What the hell is going on with True Blood?,” a revenge-driven Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsagärd) broke the prison population out of a so-called “vamp camp,” then encouraged the newly released vampires to chow down on their oppressors.
Meanwhile, hard-luck Sookie (Paquin, looking increasingly spent from what, in True Blood’s early years, was Emmy-nomination material) struggled to keep Bill (Moyer) on the straight and narrow, while Bill himself felt the pull of Lilith’s (Jessica Clark) sirens.
In Sunday’s finale, Bill will learn that salvation comes with a price — no! — while Sookie mulls over her future with the handsome Warlow (Rob Kazinsky).
Bon Temps braces itself for a new crisis — the premise, no doubt, for True Blood’s seventh season — that threatens humans and vampires alike, and Sookie’s idiot brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself once again attracted to vampire temptations. (Sunday, HBO, 9 p.m.)
The old joke that TV often seems as if it was created by a five-year-old has taken on added meaning in recent weeks, with the odd success of Axe Cop, a new, late-night ’toon about an axe-wielding police officer who metes out justice the old-fashioned way, at night and with the aid of his trusty fire axe.
Axe Cop is doled out in quick, easy- to- digest 15-minute bites, as part of the Fox network’s summer experiment, Animation Domination, an hour-long showcase of adult animation.
If Animation Domination succeeds in finding an audience — and there are signs it’s doing just that — it may replace the now-retired MADtv as a late-night alternative to Saturday Night Live, which returns this fall for a hard-to-believe 39th season.
Axe Cop was originally conceived in 2009 as a webcomic by brothers Ethan Malachai, who was 29 at the time, and Malachai Nicolle, who was five, as in — literally — five years old.
From the start, Malachai was the brains of the outfit: He came up with the stories and ideas, while Ethan did the grunt work of turning those ideas into comics.
Malachai is now nine and, one would like to think, jaded and cynical from the Hollywood fame.
The TV version is certainly surreal.
Axe Cop may be about to usher in a brave new TV world — TV mayhem as a fiveyear-old imagined it. (Saturday, Fox, 11 p.m.)