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Hm. I like Blood Ties better.

Moonlight and Blood Ties are the only two tv-shows of any main stream variety that are on tv right now, Moonlight having just premiered this month and Blood Ties having premiered last spring. Blood Ties is based on a best-selling book series; I've no idea what Moonlight is based on, except about 300 detective novels and every vampire show to precede it.

Blood Ties is a cop show and a story of sexual frustration. It's approach to vampires and magic is familiar, but that's a good thing, because it lets the central characters shine. It's more about 3 people, and one of them just happens to suck blood. I like it a lot-- it's sexy and fun and its hero is the coolest woman to appear on a vampire tv series since Buffy Summers.

Moonlight is trying really hard to be a detective series, with hard-boiled 1st person voice-overs and all. It's extremely predictable, and the take on a vampire protagonist is so familiar, I think I've watched this before. Wasn't it called... Forever Knight? Except I never watched that show, I just read crossover fic that happened to include its characters. Even so, I recognize the premise.

The biggest problem with vampire shows, of all supernatural tv series, is that they beg comparison with their predecessors. Buffy worked because it didn't really resemble ANYTHING that had come before it, and then it stayed strong because the story was brilliant, the execution was by turns cheeky and heartbreaking, and because the character interactions had a powerful sense of realism.

After seeing all of season 1, I'm happy so far with Blood Ties because it takes a lot of familiar elements from vampire stories, but it doesn't FEEL like Buffy or Angel or Forever Knight or Ann Rice. It feels like L&O meets a mature love triangle meets all the vampire books I read as a teenager.

I think that the fantasy shows that work the best, especially with a well-used genre like vampirism, are not ABOUT vampires for the sake of being about vampires. BTVS was about a girl coming of age, about sexual politics, and about recognizing that friends and family are the most valuable things in this world. Angel, though I've only seen about half that series, it seemed to me was about searching for a redemption that even the seeker recognizes is impossible to achieve, about workplace politics, and about personal responsibility. Blood Ties appears, so far, to be about a warrior fighting against her slow decent into ineffectuality (in this case, slowly crippling blindness) while also trying to decide between two lovers, each who represent different things: security and safety at a time when she's becoming vulnerable, or excitement to counteract a looming new life of boredom.

I'm not sure what Moonlight is about, except that it's about a vampire. Does this vampire have a purpose? Not that I can tell. It seems to be that he's become an investigator because he's still alive, and a person's got to have something to do for a living. He doesn't appear to have any greater motivation than trying to get by.