- Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
- Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
- Resolution: 1080p/24
- Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, French DTS 5.1, Spanish DTS 2.0
- Subtitles: English SDH, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
- Region: A (B? C?)
- Rating: Not Rated
- Discs: 5
- Studio: HBO Home Video
- Blu-ray Release Date: May 31, 2011
- List Price: $79.98
[amazon-product]B0032JTV6K[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase True Blood: The Complete Third Season on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:5/5]
The Series
[Rating:5/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:5/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:4.5/5]
Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures
(Screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG thus are meant as a general representation of the content and do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)
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The Series
[Rating:5/5]
Forget the broody teen angst of Twilight or the melodrama that is The Vampire Diaries, True Blood is dark, violent, and sexy, with a whole lot of campiness thrown into the mix just to lighten things up. As my twenty-something cousin said to me, quoted from a review she read somewhere (my apologies to the original writer), The Vampire Diaries is True Blood for vegetarians.
After Season Two‘s rather dark turn with Sookie (Anna Paquin) and the whole fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana battling the evil Maenad (a female worshiper of the god Dionysus) Maryann (Michelle Forbes) who had the power to turn people into walking zombies, practically, under her control and wild with the uncontrollable urge for sex and drink, the season ended on a cliffhanger. Sookie’s beloved vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) was mysteriously abducted.
Season Three, lightening up just a tad – and I do mean a tad – finds Sookie reaching out to Bill’s nemesis Eric (Alexander Skarsgård), the local vampire sheriff, to help her find Bill. It’s a journey that will lead all the way to Mississippi and that state’s vampire king Russell Edgington (Denis O’Hare), a three-thousand-year-old vamp with a pack of werewolves under his control, a plan to usurp the vampire Authority, and get his hands on the delectable Sookie Stakhouse.
There are more secrets to be revealed in this wild season however, as Sookie’s brother Jason gets involved with a girl who turns out to be a werepanther, Tara is stalked and abducted by a crazed vampire, and Bill has been keeping a secret dossier on Sookie’s family history that makes him seem a bit untrustworthy. Why are all the vampires so drawn to Sookie, and what is that weird light that she can shoot from her hands? It’s all revealed in this excellent third season of HBO’s hit series.
Video Quality
[Rating:5/5]
If you’ve never seen True Blood on Blu-ray, then I guarantee that you have never seen it looking as tasty as this 1080p AVC encodement from HBO. A typically strong transfer from HBO, the Super 35mm source looks amazingly detailed, sharp and clean, with inky blacks, extended shadow delineation and, of course, vermillion reds that really pop. Absent are any problems seen in the 1080i broadcasts of the series like macroblocking, unstable whites, and any softness in the image.
Audio Quality
[Rating:5/5]
The DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is wonderfully big and spacious, surrounding the listener in the natural sounds of Bon Temps. Crickets engulf you in a 360º soundscape, among other atmospheric sound effects. The sound designers are judicious, but clever with the way they pan discrete sounds around the room, perhaps someone knocking on a door or walking across a room might follow the action on the screen. Of course, dialogue is full and clean and the series’ musical score is also nicely balanced into the mix. Low frequencies are deep and highs are smooth.
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:4.5/5]
True Blood is packed with one of the best set of extras I’ve seen for a television series since Lost. There are numerous audio commentaries by the actors and crew for selected episodes plus a fun Enhanced Viewing mode that offers picture-in-picture character perspectives on scenes and other characters, access to exclusive bonus scenes that offer some interesting and often funny backstory, plus pop-up factoids. Additionally, each episode’s Post Mortem, which initially ran during the series’ broadcast, offers a combination of mini-episodes that rage from faux television commercials and televangelist shows to actual inter segments with the cast and crew, each tying into the episode in some way. Disc 5 also contains an interactive True Blood Lines feature that users can click through to learn about the many different supernatural beings in the series, their abilities, and how they are all interconnected. Best of all, all of the video supplements are in 1080p high definition.
The supplements provided with this release are:
Disc 1:
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- Commentary on Episode 2 “Beautifully Broken” by Alexander Skarsgård (Eric) and Scott Winant (Director)
- Episode 1 & 2 Post Mortems (1.78:1; 1080p/24)
- Episode 2 Anatomy of a Scene – See the actors and crew get down to work with some not so vicious, but very wild trained wolves for the closing and opening scenes of Episodes 1 & 2.
Disc 2:
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- Episodes 1, 2, & 3 Post Mortems (1.78:1; 1080p/24)
- Commentary on Episode 3 “It Hurts Me Too” by Alexander Woo (Writer) and Michael Lehmann (Director)
- Commentary on Episode 4 “9 Crimes” by Kristin Bauer Van Straten (Pam) and David Petraca (Director)
Disc 3:
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- Episodes 6, 7, & 8 Post Mortems (1.78:1; 1080p/24)
- Commentary on Episode 6 “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues” by Alan Ball (Creator and Executive Producer) and Denis O’Hare (Russell)
- Commentary on Episode 7 “Hitting the Ground” by Anna Paquin (Sookie), Joe Manganiello (Alcide) and Brian Buckner (Writer)
Disc 4:
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- Episodes 9, 10, & 11 Post Mortems (1.78:1; 1080p/24)
Disc 5:
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- Episode 12 Post Mortem
- Commentary on Episode 12 “Evil is Going On” with Stephen Moyer (Bill) and Anthony Hemingway (Director)
- Character Perspectives – These character perspectives are taken from the Enhanced Viewing mode picture-in-picture commentaries, but here they can be viewed separately, either all together or on an episode-by-episode basis.:
- Jessica
- Andy
- Tommy
- Alcide
- Snoop Dogg – “Oh Sookie” Video (1080p/24)
- True Blood Lines
The Definitive Word
Overall:
[Rating:5/5]
True Blood is a true winner. It is addictive, to say the least. True Blood is campy vamp horror meets sexy soap drama, and I love it. Season Three ratchets up the steam, mystery, and backstory on some of our favorite characters setting up what should hopefully be a thoroughly enjoyable fourth season.
Additional Screen Captures
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[amazon-product]B0032JTV6K[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase True Blood: The Complete Third Season on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:5/5]
The Series
[Rating:5/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:5/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:4.5/5]
