Perhaps it’s because I just got back from a movie about Swedish vampires, but now seems to be the right time to discuss the season thus far of True Blood.

When I last discussed True Blood, it was mainly to express my misgivings about the leaked series premiere. The show, for the uninitiated, deals with the emergence of a new “minority” — the vampire community, who have recently “come out of the coffin.” The action takes place in Louisiana, where sassy waitress Sookie Stackhouse (she also reads minds — fyi) falls in love with a dark, handsome vampire anticlimactically named Bill. She’s got an unpleasantly sassy best friend, a boss who’s in love with her, a sexy/stupid brother and a doting grandmother. And there’s also a murderer on the loose, but that fact normally takes a backseat to the fact that Sookie and Bill are having lots of hot and gruesome sex all the time.

Mostly, as I admitted, my ambivalence about the pilot was a product of my inflated expectations about Alan Ball’s next project. But now that I’ve adjusted my mindset a little, I can say with some certainly that True Blood is “reasonably entertaining.”

That’s my glowing endorsement.

What you kind of have to keep in mind is that this is basically a supernatural soap opera — not a serialized drama (there’s a difference). It’s dramatic, it’s campy and both hyper-sexual and hyper-violent. If you don’t like watching two people do the dirty-dirty while tripping on vampire blood and then follow it with a vampire vomiting blood on a woman until he disintegrates into a pile of goo, then this isn’t something you’d be interested in.

One of the things that works in True Blood’s favor — and is one thing that appears to have carried over from Alan Ball’s experience on Six Feet Under — is the show’s knack for pacing. Like SFU, True Blood is always juggling multiple plotlines, not resolving one conflict without starting (at least) one other.

Anna Paquin is strangely magnetic as Sookie, possessing a gap-toothed charm, while the rest of the cast is uniformely strong. One improvement the people behind True Blood have made on the pilot was recasting the role of Tara — Sookie’s pain-in-the-ass best friend. The previous actress (Brooke Kerr) played Tara as irredeemably angry, while Rutina Wesley gives her a bit more nuance — a cranky brat, but whose wide eyes prove she’s not wholly soulless.

I can’t say that True Blood will be a show to last the ages (although it’s already been renewed), but it’s easily the best new show of the season.

TRL goes dark on November 16, after MTV airs a two-hour special they’re calling “Total Finale Live.” Carson Daly’s coming back for it and everything. (But will my not-so-secret crush, Gideon Yago, return to do the news?) To pay tribute to the show, TiFaux has planned a whole week of music-video musings.

Not that TRL itself is all that worthy of commemoration. Most of the time, they chose to broadcast only an excerpt of a video in favor of showing the faces of hysterical teenagers. But with the end of TRL comes the end of any kind of music on MTV, even if it was just lip service at the end, and that’s significant given the network’s mammoth role in the history of popular music. Sure, we’ll all still watch videos on the Internet, but we won’t all be watching the same ones anymore. It’s bittersweet.

Here’s another fun fact: My older sister—the one who sat me down and explained to me who Britney Spears was when I visited her in college, making college seem even stranger than I imagined it to be—was actually on TRL once. She requested “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind because Stephen Jenkins was so hot WOOOOOO! She showed me the tape of it—from the same VHS on which she’d recorded the “Baby One More Time” video—and then told me afterward that they told her which video to request (well, they gave her a choice of ten) and told her what to say. (She was all, “What should I say?” And they were all, “Just call the band hot or something.”) So, there’s my insight into TRL in its last week. It was all a lie.

But videos aren’t lies. Videos are great. After the jump, I list my five favorites.

• So the CNN holograms weren’t actually holograms
• Oprah to quit her show in 2011?
• Can The Daily Show survive the Barack Obama presidency?
• Cougarfest 2… er… Sex and the City movie sequel confirmed
• Mommy, why is Lt. Daniels from The Wire making bad music?
• Dollhouse being dumped to a Friday night death slot
• RIP: 30 Days gets canned by FX
• Survivorman says “I quit”
• A Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice sweeps stunt is in the works
• This day in lists: TV babes of the 80s