I will add scans from both magazines as soon as they get here but there’s two articles in this month’s h and next month’s BlackBook. Also, I should have screencaps from both “The First Taste” and “Mine” tomorrow, it’s been a little hectic around here.

I meant to post this last night but offline issues took importance. I want to apologise for the downtime on Friday/Saturday (depending on where in the world you are), my host moved me to a different server and I didn’t know what was going on until it was already happening. I also want to apologise for the gallery being offline for some time yesterday, as soon as I saw the site was back up, I took it offline to remove the intermediate pictures from the gallery and that took a little longer than I had thought it would. So now when you click on a thumbnail, it will take you straight to the fullsize photo. I removed them mostly to save space on the server since the gallery is getting pretty huge.

Moving on, there’s an article in the recent issue of Business Week about HBO which mentions “True Blood” and includes a small picture of Anna, Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer. I’m going to be picking up the magazine itself to scan for the site tomorrow since just about everything is closed since it’s Easter. The article is online here or you can read the snippet about the show below.

All the while Plepler and Lombardo had been pressuring Strauss to hire a senior programmer to add more firepower. She balked, say insiders, and tension between Strauss and her new bosses intensified. Finally, she was out—leaving her former colleagues feeling uneasy, even though she was offered a production deal with HBO. David Simon, who created HBO’s critically acclaimed The Wire and is developing an HBO show about New Orleans, says he was “absolutely shocked” when Strauss told him she was leaving. “She’s the reason I’m still in television,” says Simon, who acknowledges feeling “nervous about getting a new boss.”

Now, with Strauss and Albrecht gone, it is the Plepler-Lombardo show. Among a slate of upcoming shows, one they’re pinning their hopes on is True Blood, a one-hour drama about vampires in Louisiana (which they greenlighted after seeing a pilot that was approved by Albrecht shortly before his departure).

True Blood, set to air in September, has one thing going for it. Its creator is Alan Ball, the man behind Six Feet Under. Ball got the idea for the show after discovering novelist Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries series in an airport bookstore. True Blood, now shooting in Los Angeles and Shreveport, La., centers on modern-day vampires who live openly in society because they can feed off new synthetic blood. Anna Paquin, who played the daughter in the film The Piano, stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress mind reader smitten with a vampire.

Plepler and Lombardo were ecstatic to work with Ball again. And they’re careful to keep Albrecht’s light touch. “Alan certainly doesn’t need a lot of handling,” says Lombardo. “It’s his pen, not ours, thank God.” While HBO asked Ball to recast one actor, it has requested minimal script changes. “They allow you to focus on the work,” he says.

True Blood is undeniably a risk. A show about vampires could have a limited audience, however brilliantly realized. But Plepler echoes the Albrecht mantra: True Blood, he says, haslarger themes that will resonate with a mass audience. “We see the vampires as a window into the disenfranchised in America,” says Plepler. With Six Feet Under, he adds, Ball examined how death is treated in the U.S.—and he’ll deliver Big Themes with True Blood, too. If the show is a hit, maybe HBO will bury The Sopranos, once and for all.