True Blood had me from the opening scene, when a wolfen fellow with long hair dressed in black is found behind the counter of a shop. We assume he’s a vampire, and that he’s called something poncy like Lafayette…only he turns out to be posing as a member of the undead, the real vampire in the scene being the guy who looks like a redneck and threatens to kill the pseud.

Speaking as someone thoroughly tired of humourless dudes wearing long black leather coats and bike boots as they go to pick up milk and kitty litter from the local Tesco, that reversal was a longed-for relief. Not that True Blood is without its stereotypes, as we were introduced in quick order to a feisty black woman tired of serving and working for imbeciles. That would be Tara, good friend of Sookie, our barmaid heroine, whose defining characteristic is that she is psychic, able to hear the inner voices of those around her. All, that is, except Bill, the local vampire.

Yes, that’s Bill. Not Draco, Pierre, or Gunther. Bill. Short for William, and here applied to a smoulderingly handsome vampire who, like his peers, gets by through consuming the faux plasma referred to in the title of the series. That in turn accounts for the vampires coming ‘out of the coffin’ and entering the mainstream of American society.

This being America, there are bigger weirdos than vampires to contend with. The presence of the undead triggers all kinds of buttons, not least a subculture determined to have carnal knowledge of them. Which is fine with the vampires, who are themselves partial to sex with humans. Add a bit of blood letting to that, and the scene can get pretty intense and messy, and the pilot episode partly concerns a woman who turns a lover on by showing him a video of her making love with a vampire, the consequence being he gets so excited he ends up strangling her in the height of passion. Oh, and the man in question is Sookie’s brother, so you can be sure this is a story we’ll be coming back to.

All this is brought to you by Alan Ball, the man who scripted American Beauty and created and masterminded Six Feet Under. Two impressive achievements, and it looks like True Blood could be a more populist third.

Like those two other successes, this new series traffics in matters of sex and death — the biggies that underpin any drama. It lacks the subtlety of Six Feet Under, but nuance and fangs are unlikely bedfellows at the best of times. Instead, we get interesting characters and situations: Sookie rescues Bill from a sick couple who want to drain and sell his blood, there being a blackmarket in vampire juice since it supposedly functions as a kind of haemoglobin-enhanced Viagra.

It’s good fun stuff, seemingly devoid of the kind of metaplot that was responsible for the weaker aspects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, so far at any rate. Given that the show is entering its third season in the States, I’m sure that in the process it’s gone into all kinds of interconnected detail that was thankfully absent tonight anyway.

Why the widespread interest in toothy bloodletters? Vampires are all over the media, almost as much as zombies. There’s something romantic about vamps though — the difference between gently nibbling a lover’s neck and levering their cranium open to get to the grey stuff — which in a classic case of reverse psychology only makes me more curious to write about the brain-eaters at the base of the undead food pyramid. And I do believe I’ve got a take that…but let’s leave that pitch for another day.