NEEDS MORE MUMMY: Oh, those jokers at Slate, trying to make us think they're serious when they ask why Mad Men receives a more fawning critical reception than True Blood.
By way of rebuttal, let me describe one scene from last night's True Blood: Sookie, a young telepathic muse/waitress lies comatose in a hospital bed. She is surrounded by her loved ones: her dim brother; a vampire boyfriend who got confused and sucked out all of her blood; a werewolf; a tough-guy short-order cook in halfhearted drag; and a woman who a few weeks ago was hypnotized by a confusingly female minotaur into polyamorous cannibalism. One friend is absent because he is busy turning into a dog to rescue his brother, who also turns into dogs, from his job, which is dog fighting; her other suitor also is missing because he's a viking secretly carrying out a millenium-old blood feud, the present step of which involves playing best man in a coerced royal vampire wedding held in a torture-chamber basement and officiated by a veteran of the Spanish Inquisition. Sookie awakens and screams, because they are all from the same town, but nobody has the same accent. And also because her name is Sookie.
