How to Fix ‘True Blood’ (or Please, Please Kill Sam Merlotte)

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True Blood is the hottest show on television, scoring the highest ratings HBO has seen since The Sopranos. I doubt that the execs at HBO are looking to tweak the two-parts-sex, one-part-blood (with a pinch of weirdness) recipe. Still, there’s something very wrong in Bon Temps.

At the end of season two’s penultimate episode, I had that itch I get when a show is no longer the show I fell in love with. It happened with The X-Files when the alien conspiracy became the show’s focus. It happened with Weeds when Nancy moved to Ren Mar. It happened with The West Wing when Aaron Sorkin left. Now, with weak love triangles, one-dimensional characters, and ridiculous storylines, True Blood feels like the life has been sucked out of it.

So as the second season finale approaches, here are three ways to fix True Blood.

1.) Less high-concept plotting, more low-key character development
The first season was simple. A serial killer was on the loose in Bon Temps, and telepath Sookie had to use her abilities to find the person responsible for the increasing body count. Along the way Sookie finds out that she can’t hear vampires’ thoughts. That silence of the mind makes her fall for vampire Bill, who is mainstreaming by drinking a synthetic blood substitute. Sad sack Sam, who has a thing for Sookie, takes a backseat to this new vampire lover.

Then there’s Tara and her alcoholic mother, Jason and his dead girlfriends, and, of course, the vampires who just don’t want to be friendly with the humans. In the first season, learning about the characters and their relationship to the changing world around them was what, in the latter episodes, made True Blood more than just a vampire show.

Then came season two. I’ll talk about the Maryann storyline in a little bit, but it goes without saying, that silly, useless, and ultimately irrelevant sideshow has been a drag on the series. True Blood got too weird, too fast. The Church of the Light episodes, however, may have done the most harm. It made the politics of out vampires the centerpiece of the show. We moved quickly into vampire abductions and terrorist bombings, without fully appreciating the new world of vampire-human coexistence. I knew the show had to take this on, I just didn’t expect it so soon when we barely had enough time to get to know all the players involved.

So in season three, let’s get back to the basics. I’m willing to forget that the show went from zero to gimmicky in 60 minutes if someone in the writers room keeps the word “subtlety” in mind every time they read a script. Only one writer on the show, Nancy Oliver, seems to be able to do that. She balanced the show’s weirdness with the depth of its characters in all three episodes she’s credited with, including the series’ best “To Love is To Bury.” Let’s see Nancy write more or at least move her up to executive producer. She knows what really makes this show tick and should have more of a say in its creative development.

2.) Make Bill a revolutionary
Bill is a character I should like more than I do. He’s a man whose convictions are often challenged by the reality of his circumstance. That I have to watch him play the jealous lover is painful for me and unflattering for Stephen Moyer. Moyer is forced, week after week, to play a vampire who fights with Sookie over the most trivial relationship issues while he could be fighting to change his kind.

The fight against the Children of the Light was his time to shine. His moral compass was pointing in the right direction, while something else was always pointing straight at Sookie. Instead of being the voice of reason, instead of challenging the status quo, Bill came off as a weakling who lacks the charisma and charm to even keep his woman. By the time Eric Northman trick Sookie into drinking his blood, thereby creating a psychic connection between the two, I was rooting for Eric. Bill needs to lose Sookie to be the vampire he needs to be.

The focus on the Church of the Light shows that the politics of True Blood are important to the show’s writers. Without a vampire to root for (especially now that Godric is dead), we have little reason to concern ourselves with the vampire rights movement. Bill could be the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the vampires. Eric Northman could be the Malcolm X. Until they stop fighting over Sookie, neither of them are up to the task.

3.) Sam needs to die
As weak as vampire Bill appears to be, no one is as spineless as sad sack Sam Merlotte. Maryann the Maenad’s Bon Temps invasion may have drove the show, full throttle, into weirdness, but it was Sam who made the storyline completely unbearable.

When we watched Sam pining away in the first season, it was okay, because the sad sack wasn’t the main player. Even when he becomes integral to the first season’s serial killer story, he’s still just Sookie’s sidekick. I liked him that way.

Suddenly in season two, this sad sack shape-shifter becomes the focus of Maryann’s sinister supernatural sacrifice plot. Instead of manning up, Sam decides to run, hide, and, most annoyingly, not shift when his town needs him. In a world where vampires exist and people are mysteriously blacking out and participating in orgies, a guy who can turn into a dog or a fly isn’t going to raise too many eyebrows.

Luckily we found a use for sad sack Sam Merlotte. At the end of last week’s episode, we discovered that Sam needs to be sacrificed in order to kill Maryann. It’s an easy out for the writers so they don’t have to continue to come up with reasons to keep this insufferable character in the show. Getting rid of Sam allows the writers to focus on the characters we actually care about. More importantly, it will give Alan Ball another chance to write about people grieving, something he does with more sincerity and insight than anyone else in television or movies today.

Alan Ball creating the True Blood TV series always made sense to me because he’d be forced to write about death in a world were death doesn’t always exist. It was a logical leap for him, as writer, to take on such a challenge. That idea has been lost, like so many other elements that made True Blood great, even exceptional. Let’s hope that True Blood‘s sophomore slump is just that and the writers return to writing something more than just a vampire show.

It’s time for a change True Blood. So please, please kill Sam Merlotte.

The second season finale of True Blood airs Sunday, Sept. 13, on HBO.