I used to say I didn't have a TV, and it sort of had that snotty "and if I did I'd only watch PBS" tone. After five months of living alone, however, I've spent so much time watching "television" - thanks Hulu and uTorrent - that it would be kind of pathetic if I didn't have anything to show for it.

1. The casting
Every face (and body, but more on that later) seems like it was made to play the role it does here (with the possible exception of Paquin, who continues to confound me with how she's chosen to play Sookie), and there's no combination of characters that I don't like to see together in a scene. Even the minor roles are filled with great actors, and I end up wishing the cast could expand and keep Stephen Root's middle-aged gay vampire who listens to the Bangles and wanted to spend more time with his son before he was "turned," or Allan Hyde's tribal Jesus-meets-Abercrombie and Fitch figure (yes, these are tertiary characters - it's HBO). Carrie Preston's Arlene Fowler (a flame-haired, raccoon-eyed single mother/waitress) and Nelsan Ellis' Lafayette Reynolds (the fiercest, hottest, gayest short-order cook EVAR) are seriously reason enough alone to watch.

2. The milieu
There's a lot of talk on the internets about how crappy and distracting the character's accents can be. Honestly, I don't even notice them half the time, which is most likely because I grew up around twang (at one point my father left a message on my Californian college roommate's answering machine and she couldn't understand what he was saying). The other half the time, I do notice and LOVE them - they remind me of home and people I know. I also love the dirt roads, the trashy clothes and heavy makeup and shellacked hair, the paint peeling on the farmhouses and the rust eating up the cars, the unkempt graveyards and the Wal-mart-furnished trailers. It may be an acquired taste, but that's why the title isn't "Three reasons YOU THE READER SHOULD like True Blood."

3. The campy sexiness
Oh, come on. Sam Merlotte - all salt-and-pepper feathered-half-mullet and puppy-dog eyes - wears his jeans so tight he has to wiggle around in the driver's seat to get his phone out of his front pocket, and I'm pretty sure the actor who plays Sookie's brother has a stipulation in his contract that he has to be shirtless at least once per episode. In fact, it's probably the only television show I can think of where the men are as sexually objectified as the women (thanks in part to director Alan Ball, no doubt). It's about vampires sucking blood and shapeshifters sneaking around and seeing what they shouldn't and everybody eventually is wearing very little clothing, all of it taking place during sultry summer nights in a cultural landscape of star-crossed lovers and supernatural beings and cutoffs.