No Other Streaming Program Like It, Ever! Sex, Violence and Gay Vampires in The Big Easy
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 8, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: True Blood, “Night on the Sun” (Season 3, Episode 8) [Stream on HBO GO]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: HBO has probably never produced a show that was more all over the map than True Blood. Moments of greatness combined with moments of weakness; sex and violence that was legitimately stirring combined with sex and violence that was cartoonishly over-done; some really excellent acting in service of some incredibly frustrating characters. The show lasted for seven seasons, full of vampires, werewolves, fairies, shape-shifters, ghosts, and killers, and creator Alan Ball seemed to have only one directive, and that was to turn everything up. And while most of the time that meant buckets of gloopy, blobby blood getting dumped over everything, other times it meant turning up the dial on things like gay sex, which while becoming a bit more familiar to cable TV audiences was still far from commonplace.
In the third-season episode “Night on the Sun,” True Blood gave its audience their most titillating moment of gayness to date when Nordic vampire sex god Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) decided to use a little situational bisexuality in order to get one over on his enemy, Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare). In a phenomenally memorable scene, Eric seduces Russell’s househusband Talbott, and then mid-coitus takes out a stake and executes his enemy’s lover.
It’s a moment that is brutal, problematic, thrilling, and up until the moment, it turns, wildly sexy. In other words, it was everything that True Blood was all about. As the seasons wore on, the show would lean on Skarsgard to bring that blend of sex and violence to basically all his other storylines, but you always remember your first and the thrill that True Blood would go there was truly a memorable TV moment.
Today in TV History: ‘True Blood’ Gave Us Some Good Gay Sex and Violence
By Joe Reid @joereid
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