Hacker Cinema
True Blood
2008 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Alan Ball
Science FictionFantasyDramaMystery
Thanks to a Japanese scientist's invention of synthetic blood, vampires have progressed overnight from legendary monsters to fellow citizens. And while humans have been safely removed from the menu, many remain apprehensive about these creatures "coming out of the coffin." Religious leaders, government officials, and vampire fundamentalists around the world have chosen their sides. But in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the jury is still out.
5 positive17 neutralfrom 22 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
22 comments on Hacker News
I'd wager that it would accelerate rather than decelerate the growing insignificance of US entertainment.
Good for Bollywood, chinese and russian cinema, and so on. For me personally, I have trouble imagining that HBO would ever again be involved in something on par with The Wire, Sopranos or True Blood, and it's not exactly hard to keep them around on a hard drive somewhere.
Isn't this the plot to the movie Daybreakers? True Blood? Morbin' time?
2.7M seems really low.
We primarily still have the paid for DVD service because there's a whole bunch of movies and TV shows that just aren't available via streaming services. For example we were just using it for the final series of True Blood, because all the previous series are on Amazon Prime, but not the last one.
There's a lot of classic movies missing from online services, as well, particularly MGM ones.
Eh what? Westworld is rated 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.8/10 on IMDB. True Blood is rated 69% and 7.9/10 on the same platforms, respectively.
Which ratings are you looking at?
EDIT: I also checked Metacritic. True Blood is rated 68 on average across seven seasons, meanwhile Westworld is rated 75 on average across two seasons. If you take the Metacritic rating peak of Westworld (Season 1) and the Metacritic rating peak of True Blood (Season 3), True Blood is only four points ahead.
Given the difference between the Metacritic score and the Rotten Tomatoes/IMDB scores, I'd be inclined to chalk it up to different audiences. But even on the preferential platform Westworld basically at parity with True Blood, not "far south" of it.
> GoT is a tentpole show with a rabid audience but it's not especially good (it's no The Wire). Deadwood and the Sopranos are from a different era of TV. Veep is great, but True Detective, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Enlightened, and The Newsroom would all be in the middle of the pack at Netflix.
As The Dude once said "Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man"
Objectively speaking, there isn't a single Netflix-original TV show rated over 9 on IMDB: https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/netflix/tv-shows?rating_imdb=9
Compared to 7 titles on HBO: https://www.justwatch.com/us/provider/hbo-now/tv-shows?rating_imdb=9
But I think your point is that when we're talking about "The Wire" level production, others have caught up (AMC, FX, etc) and Netflix can simply license those titles. But, there's notable downsides to that (you have to wait, there's a significant cost to purchase, etc). Also, AMC, FX, etc have yet to establish a long-term credibility for consistently creating high quality content...until they do, HBO as the "premium offering" in light of others is still there.
At the end of the day we're talking about whether HBO's content can sustain the justification of paying $15/month. You just need rabid audiences for that to happen, not "one dude on the internet thinks The Wire is greatest thing ever created".
I wouldn't advocate for breaking any laws or stealing anything that doesn't belong to you, but a whole lot of places have "totally unused bandwidth" and it won't hurt them at all financially for you to use 1/4 of their unused capacity.
Funny story: I'm kind of unusual that I run an open WiFi hotspot in my home, because I have plenty of unused bandwidth and guests in my house and even neighbors are welcome to borrow some of it anytime. But one of my neighbors one time downloaded illegal content on my WiFi (the exact name of the "True Blood" episode was included, with a date and time), and I got a "cease and desist" letter from the ISP. (sigh) I felt it was pretty rude of my neighbor. I mean, just because I leave my car door open in my driveway doesn't mean it isn't rude of you to use my car as a getaway car in a robbery, you know?
I would have cut my cable years ago if I could have gotten current episodes of True Blood and The Walking Dead through streaming services.
This is a step in the right direction. Comcast and Verizon must be quaking in their boots because as more networks decide to go the direct distribution route, the less necessary their TV distribution services will become.
So, off the top of my head I can think of these female lead roles who are 'strong' and a whole lot more, including sometimes vulnerable, weak, contradictory and even capricious:
Carrie from Homeland // Sookie from True Blood // Sonya from The Bridge // Sarah from The Killing // Jackie from Nurse Jackie // Tara from United States of Tara
All of those are TV shows, not movies. But I think that is just my own bias, I have a hard time remembering characters in movies because I only get ~90 minutes of exposure, compared to 450-1000 minutes a year with TV.
One point in support of the argument though -- Sucker Punch which was primarily a female cast, had to cut the most pivotal scene in the entire movie where the lead choses sex & death of her mental self rather than fighting because, despite not being explicit, it was the difference between a PG-13 and an R rating.
Breaking Bad is laced with way more profanity and graphic violence than you could swing for a PG-13 rating. It's not True Blood, but then, The Matrix and Blade are two R-rated movies with vastly different severity of content.
Have you tried their original programming recently? At the turn of the century HBO and Showtime started producing really amazing original shows that easily rival any movie and have become the top tier of TV shows. I would venture to say that most people that get HBO nowadays do it for the original programming and not the movies.
These premiere shows had a much different feel than normal "big 3" network TV shows. They tend to be much more serial, with story arcs that go for whole seasons or even longer. They also tend to have much shorter seasons (generally around 8 to 12 episodes). This serial style really lends itself well to in-depth story telling and the shorter seasons means more attention is spent on each episode (since they don't have to constantly churn out new episodes all year).
An interesting technique that many of the shows use is to base themselves off a book series but make the entire 10 to 12 episode season cover a single book. Dexter, Game of Thrones, and True Blood all seems to do this with reasonable success. It allows them to get much more detailed than a 2 hour movie based on a book could possibly be.
No, I don't think I'm forgetting that. Netflix is talking about doing five original scripted series per year. HBO does... seven or eight, maybe? (Off the top of my head from the last year, Game of Thrones, Girls, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Newsroom, and Treme; that list isn't complete). That content is all not only original but, at least initially, exclusive. Showtime is at about the same level of volume, so this isn't unique.
You're right that in terms of a fraction of hours of content per month, most of what they show is not first-run original content, but I don't watch TV 24 hours a day, so I don't care. Like I said, if I got that amount of original content from four or five different providers (let alone 10), that would be more television than I have time to watch. The fact that they mostly show movie reruns is immaterial.
The only shows I really watch anymore are the Daily Show / Colbert report, and some HBO offerings(Game of Thrones / True Blood). I tend to catch them online, anyway. There's always Netflix if I really want to watch a movie. I get all my news from the internet.
I'm reluctant to throw mine away since I won two 23" TVs in raffles(i.e. I put in $5 into a hat). The only other use for it is for my Xbox 360, and I don't play video games nearly as much as I used to in college. Instead of watching a bunch of different shows, I happened to find more interesting hobbies to fill the void such as running and flying airplanes. When the weather is too poor to do either of those and no one's around to hang out, though? I'll put a game or a show on and relax.
I am sure HBO would love to have people like you who don't have cable as subscribers. I don't have cable because I don't see anything there of value, since I can watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Hulu and get movies on Netflix. A coworker also cut his cable. He couldn't justify almost $80 a month. He said the only thing he watched was HBO and another premium channel.
The CEO's point was it is difficult to target cable cord cutters because they have already have a business model that is profitable. The telephone salesman cannot say "You can take HBO with your $50 cable or you could just buy a $10 internet subscription plan for HBO, please buy cable anyway"
They cannot retool their business to compete with standalone Netflix. I would love for them to offer there shows on Netflix like AMD does, but oh well. I personally have pirated true blood last year, but I am now just going to wait 1 year to see the next season as I waited to see game of thrones when it comes on Netflix DVD. I guess it doesn't put much money in HBO's pocket, but I guess it's better than pirating. But I know people who gotta have their fix.
I appreciate this synopsis of the original article. The Forbes article really was linkbait.
I'd go for 'True Meat' (c.f. True Blood - the drink from the TV show - artificially created human blood for vampires)
I'm glad you brought up White Wolf v. Sony. I think Penny Arcade's response at the time summed it up pretty well:
Comic: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/09/08
Post: http://penny-arcade.com/2003/09/08/
However, despite following the case closely at the time, I've never heard about any negotiations between White Wolf and Sony at any stage of the film's development. On the contrary, emails from within White Wolf indicate they were completely unaware of the film until the first trailer was released. Do you have a source for your claim that there were negotiations?
To answer your question: nothing stops a studio from piggybacking on someone else's concept, and nothing should. The Asylum's entire business model is based on it (though they also engage in the somewhat unethical practice of copying names, when they can). White Wolf has no claim to the basic ideas underpinning the World of Darkness. There's nothing unique or innovative there.
The same thing applies to The Vampire Diaries (books and TV show), Twilight (books and film), True Blood (books and TV show), and so on, of course.
It's half this and half that they want to convert DVD buyers to subscribers so they come out with the DVDs a month before the new season starts.
The market for the DVDs is still good (True Blood S3 was the #1 TV show DVD for 2011) and I'm sure they're research tells them they get more from conversions then they lose in DVD sales by opening it up 2 months earlier. And if they started selling DVDs 6 months earlier they'd lose current subscribers like you say.
"...Eric Kessler stated to industry leaders that HBO shows would not ever be available to non-HBO subscribers on digital platforms"
This is idiotic on HBO's part.
Look, it's pretty simple: I want to watch "True Blood", which is currently in Season 5. Netflix doesn't even have S4 yet. I'm willing to pay good money, say $20 for a season, but am not so crazy as to pay $$ for crappy supreme-whatever package from Comcast. The reason is not that I hate Comcast (I do) but I'm not interested in other channels (sports etc.) in the package, i.e. I want HBO only.
Firefly (as some-one mentioned underneath) are perfect examples of shows that would thrive under Netflix.
I have to disagree with this, Firefly is not the type of show Netflix should be focusing on. They need shows with low production costs with broad - lowest common denominator appeal. Expensive shows catering to a niche market (which they pretty much already have captured) is not what they're trying to do here.
There's a few ways they can go, sitcoms and short form comedies are going to be much more profitable for them at this point so Better off Ted is a much better fit.
Then there's the Showtime/HBO premium market (which folks are already paying for as a premium service). But even here I think they'd play it safe short term - more Sopranos and True Blood type mass appeal then Boardwalk Empire and The Wire (both are great, but much more focused market).
I do think that an important part of maintaining an exercise regimen is to trick yourself into making exercise a reward. Yes, the endorphin rush you get from working out can be a reward in and of itself but in my experience that doesn't always last over the long term and sometimes you need an extra boost.
My wife and I have a rowing machine and entertainment setup in the basement and we've both started working our way through TV shows that the other one doesn't want to watch (the relaunched Dr. Who for me, True Blood for her) while rowing. Both often feature cliffhangers and other incentives to keep watching, but the rule is that we only watch while we row. Makes us much more likely to do it.
You know this makes me think: If you could find out if two files are exactly alike, could you then make a cloud storage services that doesn't require uploads of files it already has on the entire cloud?
IE, John uploads True Blood Episode 4, Season 12.
Paul tries to upload the same file. They match exactly (Except maybe for names). The Uploader negates the upload and makes it look like the file is now in Paul's list, when really only one copy exists.
I haven't had Cable/Satellite since 2002. I started watching all my TV on DVDs that I bought from Amazon, but then switched to iTunes around 2006.
Now it's mostly a combination of iTunes/DVD - I'm pretty certain it's less expensive than subscribing to TV.
The good part of this (and it should be emphasized) - is that you now watch for a _purpose_ - Latest episode of Lost, BSG, Dexter, Weeds, South Park, Doll House, BtVS, Angel, The Wire, DeadWood, Heroes, The Office, Dr. Horrible, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Californication, Dr. Who, Kings, Sarah Connor Chronicles, True Blood, Torchwood.
Any time that might have been lost to just passively watching television, news, is now, of course, lost to passively reading ycombinator, nyt, wsj, groklaw... :-)
It's the basis of the True Blood TV show.