I watched season 1 of True Blood yesterday and found it engrossing, entertaining, mordant, frothy, sly and lightweight. I enjoy the twitchy, brave, perky performance by Anna Paquin as Sookie and the dry, subdued performance by Stephen Moyer as Bill Compton. I especially appreciate his concentrated stillness and the way in which he projects an absence of movement appropriate to a non-living creature. He makes a wonderful foil for Sookie, instilled by Paquin with an almost fidgety sense of movement, brightness and sensitivity. Even though I have the most investment in Sookie and Bill, I’m curious about the rest of the characters and will probably follow their storylines whenever I get the chance to watch season 2 in one fell swoop.

That being said, the unrelenting amount of sex had me bouncing forward until such scenes were over. Every time anyone had sex, which was frequently, the story’s forward momentum halted to linger on the characters flailing away. Then I had an epiphany about the reason that almost all sex scenes in modern media are so incredibly dull.

Sex, like eating and sleeping, is a pleasurable, necessary activity that all people engage in. Of course, every single action that a person performs reveals something about his/her personality or character, so of course eating, sleeping and fucking reveal personality as well. That being said, a well-constructed narrative doesn’t include events just because they show character; a well-constructed narrative includes events that move the story along. A well-constructed narrative includes events that are necessary. Sometimes, showing sex, food and sleep is not necessary.

In fact, most of the time, sex, food and sleep AREN’T narratively necessary, since we assume that people fuck, eat and sleep anyway. Therefore, a cutaway scene can be just as effective as showing the actual event. In the case of a cutaway, the readers or viewers will fill in the blanks, assuming that the characters fucked/ate/slept, and it’s much more narratively efficient, and the story can move on to more important things.

I like my sex scenes narratively relevant, pertinent to the characters and only as long as they need to be. There were a few such scenes in True Blood. For example, after Sookie’s grandmother is murdered, she flies across the cemetery in her white nightgown, running desperately and barefoot, hurtling into a collision with Bill because, even though he’s dead, he’s the only warm, tender, solid, trustworthy source of solace that she can perceive at that moment. Both of them seem ready to chew off each other’s skin at that moment in an overwhelming need to connect with each other. This scene is narratively relevant and characterologically pertinent because it’s Sookie and Bill’s first screw, and it’s driven by her desperation. It illustrates both her neediness for comfort and his for some sort of emotion. But I only need a few seconds of them practically eating each other up, and I got a few minutes. My imagination, with nothing to fill in, grew bored and left.

Another such narratively relevant, characterologically pertinent sex scene occurs between Sookie’s brother, Jason, and his drug-dealing girlfriend, Amy, when both of them are high on vampire blood. They share a dream in which they are running barefoot across a sun-drenched golf course, playing in the sprinklers. They swoop around and around, playing airplane, until someone sneaks in to their bedroom in real life and strangles Amy, symbolized in their dream by her floating away and disappearing. As a narratively important element, the blood-induced dream shows the seductive results of the vampire drug. Characterologically speaking, it gives Jason, otherwise a horny, easily manipulated dipstick, and Amy, otherwise a sanctimonious liberal psychopath, a redeeming moment by showing them as blissful, open and happy [as opposed to their scrabbling, vampire-killing, drug-addicted waking lives]. But it goes on too long, and the Technicolor golf course starts to seem pedestrian, silly and bourgeois as a choice of frolicking grounds.

There are also a bunch of narratively irrelevant, characterologically stupid and overlong sex scenes in True Blood. Most of these scenes occur when Jason has sex with anybody and when Tara, Sookie’s best friend and coworker, has sex with Sam, Sookie and Tara’s boss and person who has a crush on Sookie. These scenes are so boring that I can’t bring myself to recap even one as an example. Suffice it to say that the majority of sex scenes completely stop the forward momentum of the story to show characters grappling at each other in stereotypical fashion. It’s as if True Blood feels obligated to put forward the sex scenes in detail, even though they are ineffective, because that’s what all other media are doing. And all the other media are detailing sex scenes in the same cliched, rote way. The tyranny of boring sex scenes is self-perpetuating.