'True Blood' vs. 'Vampire Diaries'

There will be blood, suckers.

Duelling fang-focused series True Blood (which returns Sunday for its third season on HBO Canada) and The Vampire Diaries (which recently wrapped up its first season on CW and CTV) obviously aim for different audiences.


True Blood, with its savagery and sexuality, targets adults. The Vampire Diaries, which throws teen passion into the bloody mix, targets a much younger crowd.

But as a big fan of both shows, it’s fun to compare:

Series anchors

True Blood: Sookie (Anna Paquin). The Vampire Diaries: Elena (Nina Dobrev).

The abrasive Sookie is more annoying than Elena, who is super sweet. But Sookie has powers - she can read minds - while Elena is a mere mortal, so we would rather have Sookie on our side in a fight.

Good-guy vampires

True Blood: Bill (Stephen Moyer). The Vampire Diaries: Stefan (Paul Wesley).

Speaking of annoying, Bill became increasingly tough to take through the second season. He was just kind of whiny and dour all the time. At least Stefan got to “go rogue” for a while. Both these characters sometimes are too bland to actually be vampires, but we can take Stefan longer than Bill.

Bad-boy vampires

True Blood: Eric (Alexander Skarsgard). The Vampire Diaries: Damon (Ian Somehalder).

Audiences clearly have responded to Eric, who has gone from being a minor character to a major character. Damon has been a major character from the start, and a deliciously layered one at that, with his combination of tortured soul and evil chicanery. Eric’s attributes notwithstanding, we probably had more fun watching Damon this past season than any other character on TV.

Female BFFs

True Blood: Tara (Rutina Wesley). The Vampire Diaries: Bonnie (Katerina Graham).

We have to be honest and say we find Tara to be the most irritating character on TV. And don’t even get us started on her mom. Bonnie, at least, gets to be a witch. And since we see a lot less of Bonnie than we see of Tara, Bonnie wins.

Other creatures and supporting casts

True Blood: Sam (Sam Trammell), Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), Jason (Ryan Kwanten), Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), Andy (Chris Bauer), etc. The Vampire Diaries : Caroline (Candice Accola), Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen), Matt (Zach Roerig), Jenna (Sarah Canning), Alaric (Matt Davis), etc.

This one isn’t even close. For Sam, Jason and Jessica alone, True Blood would win by a mile. And there are a dozen more great characters, both mortal and mystical, to ensure there never is a dull moment.

If there are ill-fitting parts to The Vampire Diaries, usually they have to do with ramming the supporting cast - who mainly are mere mortals filling the teens-in-high-school requirement - into the story-lines.

We allow, though, that if we’re going to see more of vicious vixen Katherine - a centuries-old vampire and doppelganger of Elena’s, also played by Dobrev - in the second season of The Vampire Diaries, this could be a much tighter race.

Final thought

There now are high-quality vampire shows for every age group. Who says society has stopped evolving?

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