Season Two of the popular vampire series continues to focus on the romantic relationship between telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse and Southern gentleman-vampire Bill Compton, but now Viking Vampire Eric becomes the third, and most interesting, vertex of a frankly lacklustre love triangle. Wiser then to concentrate on the other characters in the Louisiana town of Bon Temps. Here, community tensions provide some of the best moments of the season, with parallel plots of Christian and Pagan extremism. Jason Stackhouse joins fanatic anti-vampire Christian league The Fellowship of the Sun and Bon Temps residents engage in wild orgiastic behaviour presided over by this season’s villain. Among this crowd of crazed characters, newborn vampire Jessica turns out to be one of the most sympathetic figures, and her rites of passage and often humorous love story steal the show.

While grotesque social behaviour and supernatural creatures in swampy Louisiana root the series within the subgenre of Southern Gothic, it’s been glossed-up and lightened, ready to be devoured by a modern mass audience. Like the pioneering Dark Shadows (released in 1966 and about to be remade by Tim Burton), True Blood is a gothic soap opera. It might not be as post-modern and witty as Buffy or as dark and beautiful as Carnivale, but this season offers 12 hours of fun, thrills and cliff-hangers, even if all the redundant conflicts and climaxes prevent the characters from evolving as they should.