Alan Ball

If you combine small-town drama and sexy vampires, the result would be True Blood, the forthcoming HBO series from Alan Ball, the man behind Six Feet Under. The show's cast and creator — along with Charlaine Harris, who wrote the Southern Vampire book series on which the show is based — showed up at Comic-Con on Thursday to explain to a cheering crowd what makes their show different from other vampire stories.

True Blood, which premieres Sept. 7, is the story of Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a telepathic waitress in a Louisiana town who meets a vampire when he walks into the bar where she works and she discovers she can't read his mind. The trailer we watched showed a mix of vampire effects (spiky teeth, bite marks) and small scenes of family life that would look familiar to any SFU fan — I could have sworn one dinner scene was shot in the Fisher family kitchen.

Ball promised the show would be free of "vampire cliches," which he defined as "blue light, contact lenses, and opera music." Instead, "we're trying to keep the magic as mundane as possible," he said, showing how it's just a regular part of the universe where the characters live. In this world, vampires have come back to live among humans now that a synthetic blood substance can keep them satiated, but (as Sookie learns) that doesn't mean there's no danger.

To meet the main characters, and to hear about some of the viral marketing HBO is doing for the show (including setting up a vampire/human dating service), read more

• E!'s Watch With Kristin makes me all kinds of happy by reporting that Michael J. Fox is in talks to return to TV, guest-starring on Rescue Me and reprising his role on Scrubs.
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• TV Filter has an awesome montage of reality show contestants saying they're "not here to make friends."
• If you loved the short film Presto before Wall-E, The Underwire lets you watch it again and again.
• Stereogum has the new video for Death Cab for Cutie's "Cath."
• It's Cheers week on TV Squad, and to celebrate, one of the show's writers, Ken Levine, has shared the episode of Cheers he's still writing in his head.
• Popwatch's Michael Slezak makes a darn good argument that Jessica Simpson's version of "These Boots Were Made for Walking" is the worst cover of all time. Do you think there's a cover song that tops that one?
• TiFaux watched Alan Ball's True Blood, and . . . um, it wasn't exactly a rave review.
• I'm liking Cinematical's list of their seven favorite summertime movies, including Stand By Me, Dazed and Confused and Wet Hot American Summer.
• Vulture has a chat with Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro.

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HBO plans to reunite with Alan Ball, the mastermind behind the dark and wonderful series Six Feet Under, for a drama about female prisoners. Titled Bad Girls, the show is an adaptation of a British series "about the staff and inmates of a women's prison." Reuters has more:

Bad Girls, which bowed out in 2006 after eight seasons on ITV, was praised for its portrayal of the complex relationships among female inmates. It currently airs on MTV Networks' gay-themed channel Logo.

Alan Ball is also the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty and he recently made his directorial debut with Towelhead, an indie that went to Sundance and will open in select theaters August 8.

Female prisoners seem to be all the rage these days, as Fox plots a spinoff of Prison Break that will be set in a women's prison and of course there's Jennifer Aniston's Goree Girls, the 1940s musical about the singing Texan prisoners. And then there's news today about Robert Rodriguez's "violent drama" TV series set in a women's prison titled Women in Chains! (exclamation point is part of the title, apparently) which will star Rodriguez's fiancee Rose McGowan. And of course, the show "is rumored to be fashioned with a 1970s exploitation sensibility, with such staples like mud wrestling."

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Towelhead (which also goes by the title Nothing Is Private) was one of the movies on my to-see list at Sundance that kept getting edged down by other movies, partially because of other priorities, though I also worried that it would be really disturbing. Now the film, based on the novel by Alicia Erian, has a theatrical release date of August 8 and a trailer that has only made me more uneasy about watching the movie — though also more curious, too.

The story is of the coming-of-age variety, though this one features a 13-year-old girl (Summer Bishil) whose Caucasian mother (Maria Bello) sends her to live with her Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi) in a small suburban town. She begins to explore her awakening sexuality, spending time with a boy from school (Eugene Jones III) and befriending a neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) whose intentions are far from pure. Her home life with a strict and sometimes abusive father only further drives her curiosity about her identity, her sexuality, her place in the world.

Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, tries his hand at directing with the movie, and it seems to bear his signature marks of examining the darkest corners of the human soul while offering glimmers of humor and redemption. I'm both interested in and slightly afraid of this film. To check out the trailer, read more