As True Blood’s fifth season premiere is practically here, I think it’s important to examine what could make the show better. (Disclaimer: I love the show, but I think it needs to change some things.)
Too many characters:
True Blood suffers the problem of having too many characters and too many stories to tell. Some shows, like Game of Thrones, are able to pull off having a large ensemble cast but True Blood cannot. The single hour is so thinly stretched trying to tell their stories that the focus is no longer on Sookie.
How to fix it:
Make some serious kills and commit to them. I was very pleased with the season 4 finale because of all the deaths that happened and thought the show would get back to focusing on Sookie. Yet, there are so many new characters this season that the deaths don’t even matter. The writers are also bringing back two characters we thought we were done with. Alan Ball and crew need to lessen the amount of characters if they want the show to thrive. Ripe for the killing: Anyone except for the essentials (i.e. Sookie, Bill, Eric, Pam, Jessica, Sam, Jason, and Alcide)
Too many characters are supernatural:
For me this just seems unrealistic. It seems like just about everybody on the show has some sort of supernatural ability. I have no problem with a few vampires, werewolves, shifters and witches, but seriously? There must be something in the water in Louisiana because there’s no way all of these people could be supernatural. The werewolf, shifter, and witch communities are supposed to still be a secret and too many of the characters know about the worlds for that to be believable.
How to fix it:
Kill off some of the characters that are involved in or know about the communities. I vote for Tara (if she’s not dead already), Luna, Hoyt, and Andy. The show could only benefit from writing these characters out.
It’s no longer believable:
The idea of True Blood is for it to be plausible that vampires and the like can exist in our world without our knowledge, but that just doesn’t seem to be the case. Fantasy is only believable to an audience when it is rooted in the real world and True Blood has lost that.
How to fix it:
To me this is the easiest of the problems to fix. All that needs to be done is make Sookie actually go to work more than once a season or show other characters doing something normal.
Even though I enjoy True Blood, I think the show can be improved upon by applying some relatively simple changes like the ones I have suggested. What do you think?