True Blood

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True Blood
Genre	Supernatural, Fantasy, Drama
Created by	Alan Ball
Starring	Anna Paquin Brook Kerr Stephen Moyer Lorin McCraley
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
Broadcast
Original channel	HBO

True Blood is an American television series based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries books by Charlaine Harris and adapted for television by Alan Ball. The series is produced by HBO in association with Ball's own production company, Your Face Goes Here Entertainment.^[1]

The show details the fictional co-existence of vampires and humans in a small Louisiana town after Japanese-made synthetic blood becomes available for purchase. Anna Paquin stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress at a diner who falls in love with one of the vampires, Bill Compton (portrayed by Stephen Moyer), integrated into her society.^[1]^[2]

The show will premiere on September 7, 2008.^{[citation needed]}

1 Cast and characters
2 Production
3 Viral Marketing Campaign
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Cast and characters

Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in a smalltown diner^[3]
Stephen Moyer as Bill Compton, a vampire with whom Sookie falls in love ^[4]
Alexander Skarsgard as Eric Northman, a thousand-year-old vampire Viking ^[5]
Ryan Kwanten as Sookie's brother Jason Stackhouse ^[3]
Sam Trammell as Sam Merlotte, the owner of the restaurant in which Sookie works ^[3]
Brook Kerr as Tara Thornton, Sookie's best friend.
Jim Parrack as Hoyt Fortenberry.
Chris Bauer as detective Andy Bellefleur.
Nelsan Ellis as Sookie's coworker Lafayette Reynolds.
Lynn Collins as Dawn Green, Jason Stackhouse's love interest.
William Sanderson as Bud Dearborne.
Lorin McCraley as a Grabbit Quick Clerk

[edit] Production

Series creator Alan Ball had previously worked with premium cable channel HBO on Six Feet Under, which ran for five seasons. In October 2005, after Six Feet Under's finale, Ball signed a two-year agreement with HBO to develop and produce original programming for the network. True Blood became the first project under the deal, after Ball read the first book in Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampires Mysteries series "on impulse" and became interested in "bringing [Harris'] vision to television."^[6] The project's hour-long pilot was ordered concurrently with the finalization of the aforementioned development deal and was written, directed and produced by Ball.^[1]^[6] Cast members Paquin, Kwanten and Trammell were announced in February 2007 and Kerr and Moyer later on in April.^[3]^[4] The pilot was shot in the early summer of 2007 and was officially ordered to series in August, at which point Ball had already written several more episodes.^[1]

[edit] Viral Marketing Campaign

True Blood has since been prefaced with a somewhat successful viral marketing/ARG campaign. This has included setting up multiple websites, encoding web address into unmarked envelopes mailed to high profile blog writers and others, and even performances by a "vampire" who is attempting to reach out to others of their kind, to discuss the recent creation of TruBlood, a material apparently pivotal to the initial plot.