One is about oversexed vampires, the other — oversexed mid-century office workers. Both are up for the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy this weekend. While on the surface the Southern Gothic goofiness of True Blood seems to have nothing in common with the Dostoevskian coolness of Mad Men, look under the hood and they’re the exact same show. Here’s how:
Both are “sequels” to seminal cable TV dramas.
Part of the fun of Mad Men and True Blood is seeing how they differ from the series that their creators worked on last. For Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, that means his stint as a writer on The Sopranos. For Alan Ball, it’s Six Feet Under. Ironically, Weiner and Ball have switched places a bit. Where Six Feet Under was a leisurely and understated (drug-induced dream sequences excepted) developing essay on American life, True Blood is well, as bloody as The Sopranos, if not more so.
They’re both shows ‘about America.’
A lot of people I know who were fans of Six Feet Under hate True Blood. Their argument usually boils down to a feeling that Alan Ball is slumming it in the bayou, what with the profusion of vamps, werewolves, zombies, shifters and fairies. Yet, I think Ball is being totally authentic. Six Feet Under was ultimately a show about Los Angeles: What it means to live in a sort of post-post-modern vaguely apocalyptic world of cobbled together extended families.
True Blood is ultimately about the South and the supernatural elements are crucial to the storytelling. Whether it’s B’rer Rabbit or Tennessee Williams, the exaggerated and the supernatural are at the heart of all good Southern tales. It lets you get away with things you would never be able to otherwise.
How else could Ball get away with a scene from this season where Tara, the perpetually fucked-over black bartender, found herself running furiously away from a plantation manner in a 19th-century dressing gown pursued by wolves? In any other show, the overt slave imagery would boil over. Too familiar, too cliche, too tatseless, but somehow, because the owners of the home are gay vampire lovers and the wolves pursuing Tara are werewolves, the scene seems fresh. Over the top, but fresh.
Mad Men, of course, proves the old adage that all histories reveal more about the era they’re written in than the era they’re written about. In its retelling of the 60s, Mad Men eschews hippies and hope for the quiet disappointments of fractured identity and family. Oh sure, the furniture is meticulously researched, but you know, it’s about us, right now.
They’re both soap operas.
That’s the dirty secret about Mad Men and True Blood– they’re our generation’s Dynasty. Yeah, it’s a golden age for television, but despite the high-art pretensions of Mad Men and True Blood (okay, maybe just Mad Men), both shows turn on melodrama.
In fact, it’s amazing more people haven’t noted the similarity between Mad Men and the weepy 50s women’s melodramas that clearly inspired it. The only real difference is that the heroine of Mad Men is Don Draper. Like Mildred Pierce, he came from nothing, compromised himself to make a name for himself and is rewarded for his sacrifices with nothing but scorn and animosity from those he loves. Why do you think everyone in the show is always commenting on Don’s virility? It’s to mask the fact that he’s more Joan Crawford than Carry Grant– and it’s what keeps the show so entertaining.
Though until it starts throwing in some naked vampire threeways, both shows will have to share space in my heart as my favorite show.
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