True Blood - The Complete First Season

Bon Temps is a small town in the Deep South. Folks are friendly and mostly tolerant. But the presence of a vampire in the old Compton place causes some unease, especially when it coincides with a series of grisly murders. Vampires don't pose the same problem that they always did for humans because most of them keep low profiles and they feed on a synthetic plasma called Tru Blood that's available most everywhere in two flavors (A & O). Sooky Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) doesn't believe that Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) had anything to do with the killings, but she causes some raised eyebrows when she begins an affair with him. This atmospheric HBO series, created by Alan Ball (American Beauty), is a tantalizing mixture of many genres: Mystery, suspense, horror and a dash of history. The sex is fairly explicit, the effects are admirably low-key -- if occasionally gruesome -- and the result is a hypnotically intriguing good time.