[ spoilers from 8/30, you’ve been warned. ]

I know that Alan Ball is all whacky and amazing and he’s responsible for Six Feet Under and American Beauty and True Blood. But with that in mind, I’d like to kindly ask him to never write True Blood again. Ball’s sporadic appearances on True Blood raise important issues I have with television shows and comic books. They both routinely feature different writers interpreting the same characters. But let’s stick to one issue here. True Blood.

Here’s the first problem with Alan Ball on True Blood. He doesn’t write it every episode, but he acts like he does. The various writers that contribute to True Blood work to create a cohesive universe. They pay respect to the other writers’ work on developing characters, and script their episodes accordingly. And then Alan Ball comes in and he’s all:

OH HAI GUYZ, I CREATES THIS SHOW, I DO WHAT THE FUKK I WANT.

In his episodes, Ball throws the characters’ behaviors and development out the window for his view of how they act. For example, his Jason Stackhouse is a bumbling redneck retard. To the zillionth degree. His Lafayette is uber hood.

Stackhouse is appealing because he’s the idiot kid who may have some cerebral activity, but it’s consistently stifled before it can brim over the top. He’s always the lovable retard, but Ball plays that up to the point of nausea. Jason’s arc and redemption in the L.O.D.I episodes proved him to be a nuanced dumb ass, not some slapstick retard. I love his stupidity as much as anyone, but I love that underneath it all, he’s redeemable. How stoked were you when he capped Steve Newlin in his dumb Bible-Thumping-Face?

And then there’s Lafayette. Lafayette’s arc on the show was really friggin’ interesting at the begin of the season. Tortured and left for dead in a dungeon, Lafayette’s character had been turned inside out. He had seen the darkness, and we got to see a guy wounded emotionally and physically from that sort of serious shit.

Then Ball steps in.

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