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Video -- Anna Paquin On True Blood Season 2 From TVGuide.com

It's back. In just hours we'll return to Bon Temps and pick up moments after we left it last Summer when something horrible happened outside Merlotte's.

What happens? See if Matt Mitovich from TV Guide can squeeze anything out of Anna Paquin in the clip below. By first there's this from ...

E! Online:

Paquin, who won a Golden Globe for her work as Sookie, promises we'll be seeing even more this time around.

"I get more naked this season than I did last season," she says, adding later, "We have a really great crew and everyone's really respectful. It's not an issue for me."

So, there's something for the straight guys and the lesbians, but this thing with Jason swinging toward the right, the religious right ... I hope this doesn't mean we'll see less of him. Because putting a guy like Ryan Kwanten in clothes all the time is like draping a curtain over the Mona Lisa, it's a waste. And a shame.

Clip after the jump. They'd better find a way to bring Lafayette back. I'll be very disappointed otherwise.

Around the Horn -- HBO True Blood Season Finale Edition

Very exciting conclusion to one story while another peers 'round the corner tantalizing us in ways that you might not have imagined when we first checked in the residents new and old of Bon Temps, Louisiana  just twelve weeks ago.

Right?

There's always so much press around a show's season finale that I thought we'd go around the horn to see what's been said both both and after, most of the before coming from the mainstream press, and from what I've read throughout the season msot of the after coming from the LiveJournal pages of various twenty-somethings that have latched onto the show, watching it two and three times in a week as it airs across the HBO digital spectrum.

Of course, we first go to this story on Ryan Kwanten from the Vancouver Sun:

The real-life Kwanten is a stark contrast to Jason Stackhouse, his character on True Blood, the HBO vampire drama from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. The actor agrees, admitting that he has very little in common with the "modern-day, redneck Casanova" he plays on the show.

"He has no willpower; he has an addiction complex; he has an insecurity complex," Kwanten says. "But I think everyone knows someone like Jason - well, maybe not to the full extreme of the trouble that he gets himself into."

He soon discovered that the hardest part of playing Jason wasn't mastering the Louisiana accent, performing the frequent nude scenes or even acting opposite vampires and demons. No, Kwanten struggled most with making Jason a three-dimensional, sympathetic character.

Not much in the way of images, but it's the lengthiest profile I've seen written on him since the show started.

Part of the jump forward in time at the end of the episode, however, has Heather Havrilesky at Salon a bit wary:

Enduring the terrible Southern accents on this show is bad enough, without a clichéd herd of Bible-thumping fundamentalists to drag us through every worn-out stereotype in the book. The nice thing about Sookie and Sam and Tara and Bill, after all, is that they're new to us. We're not sure what drives them or what they're capable of just yet. In contrast, those old familiar saccharine smiles and cries of "Praise Jesus!" are just a few clicks away on TBN at all times. To most of us in this country, evangelical Christian shenanigans are old news.

A few clicks away? Heather, try three exits away on the 405, which is how far I am from TBN right now. I sleep that far away from TBN in the constant fear that Jan Crouch's mascara applicator will self-animate and turn me into a Christian drag queen.

I love a good religious hypocrisy story, bring it on I say! What hypocrisy, you say? Just wait, a story about a self-righteous pompous purported man of God using Him to divide us into armies for battle will always turn into a story about religious hypocrisy.

Watch Jason meet the evangelist from the Fellowship of the Sun in a clip after the jump, and there's another surprise clip and ... and (just for emphasis) more !

True Blood: "Mmmmmm ... V-Juice!" And, Watch Episode Three Online Now!

Vampire juice, folks. You know, the blood of a vampire, which evidently does the following:

• Heightens all senses
• Heal
• Makes one super horny

Hey, Sookie, don't let your brother Jason get any of that, he's already had sex twice in two episodes, I think it might fall off if he gets any more aroused.

Wait, strike that. Hell, give him all he wants. As long as he's ripping off his t-shirt and jeans I'll tune in.

Yeah, I had to turn away when Sookie fed on Bill after her beatdown at the hands of the white trash Rattrays. Not at first, but there was a moment, just a moment, when Sookie's back arched and it looked like she was really going to town on Bill's vein ... and I kinda got creeped out.

Best scene from the second episode. Vampire Bill meeting Sookie's grandma.

And, like I said, more hounddogging for Jason. Hey, any time they want Ryan Kwanten to take his shirt off I'll turn on the TV.

I would have written more (and posted a better pic of star Anna Paquin) but I have no access to the HBO press site. I'm trying to correct that.

You can watch full episodes online, including the yet to be aired third ep, you know. Just click over to HBO.com/trueblood.

Meet Sookie. Meet Bill. Meet the Hottest New Show on TV!

Very hot show. Like a backwater Louisiana Summer night hot. Sweltering, steamy, dripping ...

Have I made myself clear?

True Blood is the perfect pay cable show.

This is a great cast of hot looking actors led by Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer (bathe in the photographic hotness, above and right) taking on sexually-charged situations with an innovative narrative, and a big story arc question ripped from our current soci0logical milieu, then tossed up and twisted around just enough to challenge the core issue of our society in this day.

The question: What do we do about our fear of people different than us?

So instead of darker-skinned people or gay people or Muslim people or Jewish people or whatev, the people that are feared here are vampires, but they are vampires who don't necessarily need to drink the blood of human to survive.

You see, the Japanese have created a synthetic that seems to be doing the trick, though it certainly doesn't do the trick quite as well as the real thing supposedly and supposedly actual vampire blood has its benefits for humans as well, it's been discovered.

So, it goes both ways, so to speak. Just enough so that everyone can look at anyone else and be a bit suspicious.

But after years of living in the shadows, the vampires feel this is their time to go mainstream, even showing up on Real Time with Bill Maher to lobby for their rights.

It's in this environment that the show open. In Bon Temps, Lousiana, they hadn't had any vampires come around until Bill walked into Merlotte's one night as waitress Sookie dealt with the skeeviest couple in town. Add to the mix that Sookie has a past with these two, is intrigued with vampires, and, oh, get this ... she can hear people's thoughts, and when Bill walks in, it's go time.

And you know what, that as much as you're gonna get from me on plot.

I will tell you that Sookie has a brother who's way with women is gonna get someone killed (oops, is that too much?), a best friend with a smart mouth and a crush on her bro, a boss who loves her to death (and she knows it, too. Remember the hearing people's thoughts thing?) and her grammy is the wonderful Lois Smith from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co. (currently starring there in The Road to Bountiful).

The brother is Ryan Kwanten (above left), former underwear model, co-star of Summerland (I felt dirty watching that show because of him, he was so young then) and there is plenty of opportunity to see Ryan act and see him shirtless and pantsless in the pilot.

(UPDATE: I just looked at Kwanten is 32, I was under the impression he was much younger. I had no reason to feel like a dirty ol' man at all.)

About that pilot, you can watch it at HBO.com if you like, or you can catch it on HBO on Demand wait till it airs again and again on the channel.

Catch this show, it'll satisfy that certain somethin' somethin', scratch that itch, fulfill you in a way almost nothing else on TV can.

HBO Trading John for Blood, Milch for Ball

But they're sticking with an otherwordly story.

On the heels of HBO sending John From Cincinnati into the high surf that even Laird Hamilton won't go into, the Reporter has word that the cable network has picked up Alan Ball's True Blood, a drama based in the South about vampires starring Anna Paquin.

She just co-starred in the net's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which is up for a number of Emmys, despite not being seen by a vast majority of HBO viewers, let alone TV viewers.

Of course, Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, has a previous relationship with the network.

Well, you know how I feel about blood, so I don't know how interested I am in this, but I'll check out anything once, even this.

The thing is, I love watching TV with no commercials, and beyond the pilot eps that run on FX, that leaves HBO and Showtime.