So far, the similarities are striking, and one would expect continuous comparison between the two, and yet their genre, pedigree, and network associations make these shows seem as far apart as The Wire and Gossip Girl. Oddly enough, I gave True Blood (TB) a second chance when Jason Mittell and Louisa Stein praised its politics and narrative complexity during a Flow conference Wire panel two years ago. In contrast, I tried The Vampire Diaries (TVD) again after my online fan friends praised its strong female characters and intricate plotting. Both shows contain complex plots with often unexpected surprises and fast turnarounds. TB follows a variety of plot and character lines to create an expansive set of stories while TVD remains more singularly focused and thus tremendously fast paced. Both shows take more than a couple of sentences to retell a single episode, with ambiguous characters and repeated betrayal as constants.

And yet one is quality TV on HBO, watched by men and women alike, and names such as Alan Ball and Anna Paquin all but guarantee that it be taken seriously as an artistic engagement–even if we may just watch it for the bloodied sexual encounters and the melodrama. The other is firmly defined as teen TV, runs on the CW and its stars are more likely to appear on the cover of the online Portrait magazine than Rolling Stone. Part of this difference in perception between the two programs is clearly gendered: TB’s extreme sexual violence and voyeuristic viewer position invites male viewers even where the initial topic of a female protagonist and her vampire lover might not. Moreover, the amazingly artistic and political trailer promises a depth that I personally feel the show fails to deliver. TVD, on the other hand, is clearly geared toward young girls with its high school protagonist and two male hunks who desire her. The high school setting and teen tropes mark the show as a typical CW show, with its melodramatic aspects foregrounded rather than hidden. Likewise this allows for viewers’ identificatory potential in a way that TB doesn’t: TB instead establishes a more distanced view position that profits from its visual spectacle.

Part of me wants to like TVD simply because it seems more honest in its range, goals, and intended audiences. But I can’t fault a show for its paratexts nor for its reception. So why do I ultimately enjoy and prefer the teen show over its more sexy, adult, quality counterpart. I don’t particularly like Elena better than Sookie (faux Southern accent notwithstanding) nor do I find Somerhalder that much more attractive than Skarsgård. Plots in both are a fast and crazy ride, and while the production values are clearly better in the HBO show, both are sufficiently glossy and visually enjoyable. I do find sexual and racial politics more problematic in TB, but my reasons for liking TVD are actually about themes and characters: I enjoy the teen characters as a way to explore coming of age and adulthood anxieties via supernatural metaphors, and I like the way I can identify with the characters rather than merely observing them on their wild rides. Television certainly doesn’t need to be edifying, but I more often feel like I want to explore the moral dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts in TVD. If I were to pick a worthy successor of Buffy’s Sunnydale, it would be Mystic Falls rather than Bon Temps.

Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse

Summer is always a great time to catch up on TV you missed, and both of us have recently binged on the first two seasons of HBO’s True Blood, catching up to current airings of season three. True Blood, despite all of its campiness, has been hailed as “quality television” and become a major force in summer television schedules. Yet, many of the critics who praise it – including Todd Van der Werf  at the L.A. Times – freely admit that they have never read the books it is based on, and don’t intend to do so. Their loss. Summer is a great time for reading, too, and we’ve found Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries (aka the Sookie Stackhouse stories) to be fun, sexy, suspenseful, and a totally different experience than True Blood.

The Southern Vampire Mysteries currently include nine serial novels and several interstitial short stories following Sookie, Bill, Eric, Alcide and more. They are usually categorized as “paranormal romance” or “urban fantasy,” both messy genres that mix up romance (or even erotica), supernatural elements, and often some kind of mystery or action plots. These genres are directly aimed at women, offering female protagonists through whose experiences and perceptions the story unfolds. Sookie is just such a protagonist in the books, describing her “disability” of telepathy, musing over her relationships, and agonizing over decisions about how to survive yet another supernatural conflict. In fact, some of critics’ dissatisfaction with Sookie in True Blood may come in part from the way that television has erased a lot of internal character moments in order to show us the action. Sookie’s internal musings about relationships and her deepening involvement in vampire politics just don’t come across as well without her first-person narration.

Dead Until Dark, the first novel in the Southern Vampire Series

It’s also important that Harris calls these her Southern Vampire Mysteries – these books could also be described as “cozy mysteries”, which is certainly  the genre of Harris’ other series (Lily Bard (Shakespeare), Aurora Teagarden, and Harper Connelly). Cozy mysteries feature non-professional women solving crimes – they “just happen” to be there, they are resourceful and charming, and their relationships with neighbors, friends, family and romantic partners are highlighted. These novels – everything from Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple” books to Diane Mott Davidson’s catering mysteries – focus on character development and fast paced plots, with little explicit sex or violence. Sookie novels do the same (with a little more sex, and a lot more blood). And Sookie novels, like other cozies, are serialized books, allowing readers to follow a likeable character through any number of unlikely adventures, solved cases, and boyfriends. Ending with a cliffhanger – or a preview of the next book – is common, and this structure is replicated well in True Blood. Serialized narrative in novels also activates a bit of a collecting urge, pushing one to read the next and the next, to binge on the novels and enjoy the sense of completeness it brings to see books on a shelf, or to know the whole story. Obviously, this kind of binge is common to serialized television, as well, possibly making serialized novels a uniquely well-suited medium for television adaptation (see also: Dexter, The Vampire Diaries, Rizzoli & Isles, etc.). Television offers the time to visit subplots, character moments, and nuances that film adaptations of books must often gloss over, often turning a single novel into an entire season.

Finally, for those of us from small towns and/or the South, the Sookie Stackhouse novels portray a rural Southern experience that is funny, relatable, and affectionate. Despite the problems and limitations of life in Bon Temps, the portrayal of this world is not condemnatory. As a native of the Mississippi Delta, Harris creates a vision of life in the South that’s neither overly romanticized nor too simplified. No “urban fantasy,” the Sookie novels move to a nearly nostalgic rural Southern environment and challenge it with the supernatural. True Blood may attempt to do the same, but the sense of a small community fades into a collection of high-profile characters, and the accents are terrible (we’re looking at you, Stephen Moyer).

While True Blood at times does cliffhangers well and makes some good additions (extending Lafayette’s presence and introducing Jessica), Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries offer a much different serial experience in a wryly lighthearted and suspenseful story world that’s sure to add some fun to your summer.

It’s a teen show, it’s vampire-based, you might think it’s derivative Twilight crap.

But Vampire Diaries is doing something particularly skillful with a scenario that could as flat as the rest of the product that passes for programming on The CW.  And here’s why.  

1.) The Set-Up:

Vampire Diaries tells the tale of a beautiful teenage (orphan) girl who attracts the affections of two century-old vampire babe brothers. They love this girl, Elena, because — GET THIS — she is a dead ringer for the ancient vampire, Katherine, who turned them into vampires — but that they both loved!

Elena’s doppleganger, Katherine, circa Civil War

2.) It’s pure genre.

Genre television works within a (relatively) established paradigm, draping its narrative on the fact that it is pre-established as a “procedural,” “a sitcom,” etc.  Which isn’t to say that genre television is bad; but that there are expectations that show challenges or confirms to various extents.  Vampire Diaries is teen television and follows many of those codes, but it is also melodrama.

Let’s not consider melodrama a genre, but, as per Linda Williams, a “mode.”  Thus it’s a way of expressing a certain genre, and Vampires Diaries is a teen television expressed in the melodramatic mode — which means that it employs a high level of seriality coupled with intense, skyrocketing emotions.

There is a lot of mooning and looking into the distance and a complex web of exboyfriends, secret hook-ups, and frenemies.  There’s ample use of an earnest indie soundtrack, manifesting the melos that accentuates the moments when speech simply fails.

Yet the show manages to pull off this who-loves-who, who’s-a-witch and who’s-a-vampire, who-are-our-heroine’s-real-parents business with a straight face.  Therein lies the key to Vampire Diaries‘ genre success: it revels in its very genre-ness.  Vampire Diaries takes the melodrama to 11.

But it’s also not camp, which is crucial.  We like to think that teenagers only want snarky or satirical texts, but sometimes we all want emotions to be worthy and legitimated.  Which highlights another crucial function of the melodrama: it makes the world seem, even for one moment, morally legible.  In the end, our vampire hero loves and cherishes our human heroine, and all is right with the world.

3.) Intertextuality.

Vampire Diaries is the child of no less a teen auteur than Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek). Even as the text oscillates between flashbacks of the antebellum South and an absurdly quaint contemporary Carolinian town, it also manages to acknowledge and play upon its antecedents.

In one of my favorite moments of this show, the “bad” vampire brother leafs through Twilight, exclaiming “What is up with this Bella girl? Edward is so whipped!”  What’s more, the good and bad brothers are clear ‘descendants’ of Buffy’s Angel and Spike, and the text regularly highlights its knowledge of the vampire genre, explicitly manifesting and debunking aspects of vampire lore.  Vampire Diaries is earnest and straight-faced, but it’s also smart, like that cute nerd in high school.

4.) Innovation.

As a pre-sold, Alloy Entertainment Product, it could rest on the laurels, riding the cultural wave of Twilight and True Blood.

But Vampire Diaries regularly employs intricate flashbacks to another century.  Costumes!  Teen vampires meets narrative complexity! It’s also crafted a heroine who is no Bella — she’s smart, has her own volition, and speaks her mind.  She has sexual desire, and isn’t meant to be some cipher for the return to the cult of true womanhood, as is made so disturbingly transparent in Twilight. The show refuses to be abstinence porn (Twilight) or soft-core erotica (True Blood).  There’s a coven of vampires locked in a vault beneath a seemingly peaceful Southern hamlet.  Can you get more obviously, beautifully allegoric?

I realize I may have made the show sound like a blood and thunder soap opera  — The Perils of Pauline meets My So-Called Life.  Good.  That’s exactly what I was hoping for.  Both of those ‘programs’ demonstrate, in very different ways, the pinnacle of melodramatic plotting.  And Vampires Diaries deserves its place amongst them – not to mention your viewership.  So why aren’t you watching?