I find it hard to argue with this list. And now that I read it and am reminded that all these things happened and I opinion of the show dips even more.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/08/22/a-slow-descent-into-hate-watching-true-bloods-10-worst-subplots/

A slow descent into hate watching: True Blood’s 10 worst subplots

It’s hard to remember the precise moment that watching True Blood started to feel like a chore, but a good guess would be Season 3. Halfway through, Bon Temps’ boring, all-around good guy/shapeshifter Sam Merlotte discovered his trailer park parents were entering his shapeshifting brother Tommy in dog fights. This was not True Blood’s first unnecessary subplot, and for all of its bad taste/drama it was far from the show’s worst.

When True Blood’s final episode airs on Sunday night (9 p.m. ET, HBO), it brings to an end seven seasons of perhaps one of the most confounding successes in television history. And, for many of those who stayed with it past the second season, five years of hate watching. Because after Season 2, the show tried to be more — so, so much more — and failed spectacularly at every turn. What was a show about one psychic human, her shapeshifting boss and a gaggle of vampires evolved into a messy clutter of werewolves, werepanthers, mediums, monsters, maenads and, most embarrassingly, faeries (show’s spelling, not ours).

For every scene with Eric and Pam (MVPs Alexander Skarsgard and Kristin Bauer van Straten), Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) or Sarah (Anna Camp), you had to put with Tara and Lettie Mae, or Andy or Arlene, or Sam, or Anna Paquin’s increasingly intolerable Sookie Stackhouse. Yes, the central figure in the True Blood universe had little to do after Season 1 except get herself into life-threatening situations that vampires Bill (her real-life husband Stephen Moyer) or Eric would be forced to get her out of.

Even then, Sookie figures minimally in the show’s worst subplots, which is what makes them terrible. Most of them had nothing to do with the central plot of True Blood and their respective conclusions or lack thereof made them even more trivial than they seemed on the surface. Noah Love and Caitlin Hotchkiss wrap up the 10 worst subplots of True Blood’s seven seasons:

1. Ghost Tara’s absolution of Lettie Mae
Rutina Wesley had to deal with a lot of mystifying character development after Season 2, but I would kill to have been in the room when she got a look at the scripts for Season 7. In the opening minutes of the first episode, Tara — one of the show’s more central human characters — is killed offscreen. If that wasn’t bad enough, her vampire blood-driven dream ghost then leads her alcoholic, religious zealot of a mother, Lettie Mae, her cousin Lafayette and her stepfather, whose name/existence truly does not matter, on a four- or five-episode goose chase to their old front yard. There, they discover … a gun? Tara reveals she buried it there as a child rather than killing her biological father, who drove Lettie Mae to be the horrible person she was. It’s hard to quantify how much the show did not need a redemption story for Lettie Mae, the fringiest of fringe characters. But the revelation of the gun and the explanation of its existence were legendarily poor writing decisions. — NL

2. The Werepanthers
If True Blood is a bad fever dream, this Season 3 subplot is the temperature spike. Werepanthers — which aren’t a thing in any mythology but hey, OK — play a role in the book series, but the show’s attempted nod to the books was more like a muscle spasm. I mean, what could possibly be problematic about a storyline where Jason gets tied up, held hostage in a backwater commune full of supernatural shape-shifting tweakers, and is repeatedly raped by underage girls so their werepanther line can be repopulated? This subplot was so horrifying that it’s no wonder the showrunners aborted it pretty much immediately, then burned and salted the earth for good measure. (It is never discussed again at any point in the series.) — CH

3. Terry and the Ifrit curse
It should be mentioned that while many of True Blood’s characters had either little to do or crap writing to deliver, many of the actors themselves put in pretty good performances. In particular, Carrie Preston (Arlene) and Chad Lowe (Terry) could often transform terrible writing into watchable tripe. Doubtless that is why ex-soldier Terry was given a heftier subplot in Season 5, which gave depth to the character’s previously underplayed PTSD issues. Too bad it was a disaster. In one of the show’s many attempts to get political, the story was that Terry and his Iraq war buddies had fallen under a curse, and that a fire demon — or an Ifrit — was demanding a blood debt from one of the three of them. It ends with Terry and Arlene killing one of the friends to fulfill the debt. But then Terry has himself executed because he’s messed up or something. It’s complicated. Either way, we get to see Arlene upset for a long time. — NL

4. Bill’s Civil War redemption story
The Season 6 heel turn for Bill Compton — who went from being a tortured, boring hero to a naked, blood-soaked vampire god who wanted to eat the planet — would have been effective if the show had followed through with a proper villain’s demise. Instead, Bill is reborn and redeemed, and in the final season of True Blood, the audience is also expected to forgive him by suffering through random, jarring flashback sequences to Bill’s past as a Civil War hero. Whether it’s saving slaves, being an honourable family man, or just wearing a ton of de-aging pancake makeup, these sepia-toned moments do little to support vampire Bill’s constant mourning of his lost humanity. Also, the whole trying-to-kill-everyone thing. — CH


5. Faerie Land
Season 3 ended with Sookie discovering the source of her telepathy and why powerful light occasionally shoots out of her hands: she’s a faerie. The fourth season opens in the faerie world, which is quickly revealed to be a nightmare for Sookie, so she finds a way back to Earth. The whole ordeal takes about 15 minutes and its entire purpose it to push the timeline of the show forward a year. Problem is the faeries kept popping up and rarely contributed anything of value to the proceedings. Most egregiously, one of them slept with Andy and left him with triplets who grew into teenage girls in a few days. Jessica killed two and the one who lived had numerous useless subplots of her very own. Faerie land was the gift that kept on giving the show characters it never needed. — NL

6. Lafayette is a medium
It must be hard being an ordinary, non-supernatural person in the world of True Blood. When it comes to languidly sassy Lafayette Reynolds (whose “Who ordered the burger with AIDS?” smackdown from Season 1 is still a series highlight), the writers decided they couldn’t just let him be his fabulously smart-assed human self. So they went ahead and made him a medium in Season 4, complete with an absolutely cringe-worthy subplot of being possessed by a slave who seeks vengeance for the murder of her baby back in Olden Times. Did this have any relevance to the wider plot? Probably not. Was it just an excuse to get Lafayette to attack people, steal a baby and speak in a Creole woman’s quavering voice? Most likely. — CH

7. Werewolves
I could have called this one “Alcide,” because most of the werewolf stuff centred around Sookie’s on-again, off-again, on-again, then dead love interest played by himbo Joe Manganiello. Most of it was about Alcide’s unwillingness to traditionally lead a pack. One time he was mad at Sam for dating a shapeshifter who was the mother of one of his pack’s progeny. Alcide was briefly addicted to vampire blood. Alcide, uh, did stuff. Point is, he was on the show for a long time and then they wrote him out in the first episode of Season 7 because he was dating Sookie and they needed to get her closer to Bill and Eric to end the series. Alcide had no character arc and the werewolves only existed to involve him, so, great work everyone. — NL

8. Roving Hep V-positive vampires kill an entire town, then threat evaporates completely
True Blood’s final season was a metaphor for the show’s biggest issues, since it opened with a bang then fizzled to a sad wet fart of nothingness. Season 7 established the threat of murderous “Hep-V” infected vampires attacking and feeding on humans, but that was an excuse to ride the coattails of The Walking Dead and its swarming scenes. Curious that the show made it sound as though this was a worldwide threat, with entire towns apparently destroyed (plus, hearkening back to the real-life Hurricane Katrina disaster with the “FEMA HELP US” signs was both tacky and tasteless). Yet, the audience only sees about 10 mangy vampires. Even more curious that these murderous vamps are destroyed halfway through the season, and no more appear afterward. If you’re going to establish a season-wide underlying threat, pay more than lip service to it after Episode 3. — CH

9. Sam and Nicole
Sam and Tara were written into more time-wasting scenarios than any of their co-workers, and Sam’s final arc was almost as pointless as Tara’s. After Sam’s girlfriend Luna dies in the first episode of Season 6, she asks him to keep her werewolf daughter away from her werewolf in-laws. Sam goes on the run with help from a new character named Nicole, who somehow appeared in nine of the season’s 10 episodes but is mentioned just once on the season’s Wikipedia page. Here’s what that page doesn’t recap: Sam and Nicole are thrown into one of the most awkward romances in television history. They have zero chemistry but somehow manufacture a child. At the end of Season 7, Nicole convinces Sam to leave Bon Temps to raise their child, though even at that point her apathy toward him seems as palatable as ever. — NL

10. Tara is an MMA fighter
In Season 2, things were looking up for Tara. She met and fell for a man named Eggs (because his name is Benedict, get it? Oh god everything is horrible), and even though they fell under a maenad’s spell and ate a human heart together, it was tru luv. Nothing says soulmates like shared cannibalism. But when Eggs is shot and killed, a grief-stricken Tara leaves Bon Temps, becomes a buff MMA fighter and starts sleeping with women. As one does. In typical True Blood fashion, neither the lady-loving nor the face-punching is mentioned after Season 3’s first episode. — CH