There’s a torrent floating around of the pilot for Alan Ball‘s new HBO series, True Blood. The series is based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris and combines romance and horror with a lot of sex. Set in Louisianna, the show focuses on Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a waitress who can hear other people’s thoughts (shades of Heroes). Thanks to a new synthetic blood product, vampires have begun to “come out”. When one finally walks into the lounge where she works, Sookie promptly falls in love with him. Equally promptly, her horn-dog brother gets arrested for murdering a local fang-hag.

The show has a lot of sex in it. There’s a hand job in the teaser, lots of bawdy talk in the bar where Sookie hangs out and some fairly graphic imagery in the scenes betweent the brother and the fang-hag.

By comparison, there’s not much vampire in the pilot. No blood sucking, no garlic or imageless mirrors. We do learn that vampires can’t touch silver and we see a few fangs here and there. And we learn that a lot of people are having sex with vampires. Other than that we don’t learn much about Sookie’s love interest, Bill Compton or about vampires in general.

I wasn’t totally sucked in by the pilot. I kind of didn’t get it. I found Sookie’s character unbelievable and the way the pilot plot was laid out a little confusing. But I have faith in Alan Ball and am hoping that series will mature when they go into production.

There seems to be an ARG game developing to promote the series on the web sites Blood Copy and the Revenant Ones. HBO has been sending out synthetic blood and other promotional items to some bloggers, but I didn’t get any.