I miss True Blood

I'm a binge-watcher.  When I discover a show that I like I'll watch the whole thing, or as much as I can in one go and keep it up until I've seen it all.  When I first got into Game of Thrones it was to my behest, spurred on by a friend I worked with, when I watched a few episodes I was hooked and I followed through.  I had to catch up at the time as the latest season was about to air and I had 3 to catch up on.  I'm quite good at avoiding things entirely when I am not interested, and up until then I had no idea what the show was actually about.

I have always had an affinity for Vampire lore.  I read Bram Stoker's Dracula - which I found infuriating but I think the main reason for that was because of the time period it was set in, the chauvinist attitudes were insinuating and made me seethe with the desire to slap some of the male characters, I digress - the story was frustrating too though because of how little the characters knew of vampires, but you can't hold that against the author when he was the first to create a work centred around them.  Over the years though I have explored many series that focused on Vampires.  From the cheese of Vampire Academy to the cream of True Blood.  The latter I have been missing lately.

A few months ago I watched the first episode of The Vampire Diaries - yes, a little late to the party here too - and I liked what I watched.  I made my way through the seasons but it went stale quite quickly for me.  I followed through, watching every episode up to date and my over arching opinion is that this is mediocre at best.  True Blood was so much better to me, but I guess the creators of The Vampire Diaries would probably have been prepared for the comparisons before they ever produced a pilot.  The Vampire Diaries vs True Blood is a no-contest for me, True Blood wins hands down.  The problem though is when something is good, it becomes hard to match.  This is something that's been true of many things not just Vampire Serials but throughout the entertainment industry as a whole.  Our expectations over time have been raised, and when we return to older works we find them hard to embrace.  In the same way that returning to Bram Stoker's classic was frustrating, we find it hard to go back to simpler times.

I get this with a lot of things I remember watching when I was younger.  I loved Charmed and could not get enough of it, yet last year when I took the notion of binge-watching the whole series again I couldn't make it more than a few episodes in - Nostalgia it seems is very good at making our memories far happier than the reality.  I said in a previous post that I was contemplating the nature of life crises, mid and quarter, if it's true to say that our nostalgia makes things seem happier than they were then perhaps it could be true to say the same of people.  Maybe we weren't as happy as we think we were, and maybe the people we miss are more-so the idea, as opposed the reality.  If that's true then it would mean the reality of longing for days that have passed is even more depressing as the days you recall never actually happened - not as you imagine them anyway.  Isn't that a sombre thought?