For the last couple episodes of True Blood, the denizens of Bon Temps have been concerned about a maenad in their midst. The maenads were the handmaidens of Dionysus or Bacchus. Dionysus is the deity in charge of boozing, ecstasy, and ritual madness. On his high holy days, his female worshipers would get wasted, engage in random carnal acts, and tear animals limb from limb with their bare hands and eat the raw flesh. Ya know, party hardy.

On season two of True Blood, the vampires and shapeshifters and telepaths and regular folk are all scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to deal with the character of Maryann Forrester wreaking havoc in their town. Maryann Forrester is apparently a maenad and she calls Dionysus or Bacchus “the god who comes” and she is hoping to sacrifice something sufficiently tasty to get the object of her worship to actually show up for the party. According to the vampire queen, maenads always expect their deity to show up and they get stood up every time. Unfortunately, the vampire queen is played by Evan Rachel Wood, who looks beautiful in her red-painted lips, but is utterly unconvincing as a ruler who has been undead since before the industrial revolution. As a disaffected teenager, Evan Rachel Wood is a believable enough actress and I think she even gets prettier as she gets older, but Bill Compton’s maker Lorena, played by Mariana Klaveno, comes across so much more elegant and queenly. And what is up with the late 40’s-ish bathing suits and Eisenhower references and the whole art deco thing from a vampire who is older than man’s mastery of the steam engine? Anyway, oddball casting and styling and not exactly this otherwise excellent show’s finest hour.

Back to the maenad Maryann Forrester. Maryann Forrester is played by Michelle Forbes, who I first came across as the morbid but fun Dr. Julianna Cox from the coroner’s office on Homicide: Life on the Street. No stranger to genre, Michelle Forbes has been in Star Trek: Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, 24, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Lost, and more. I’ve seen some people whining about a genre show like True Blood appearing on HBO, but I hardly think True Blood pushed Sopranos or Deadwood off the air and I like seeing someone actually put effort into making a serious quality genre program for adults.

At any rate, Maryann Forrester is down with whatever keeps the party going. Every time she orders in a restaurant, it makes me crack up because I looooooove ordering multiple entrees and appetizers and waiters and waitresses often ask parties I am with if we are expecting more people. So Maryann Forrester is a sensualist. She likes to eat. She likes to throw legendary parties. She doesn’t mind the rough stuff, evangelizes it even. She cooks a delicious semi-human heart. And she wants to sacrifice Sam Merlotte (the workplace sexual harassment wereguy) to her deity. I admit that I am way past the point where I find orgies tiresome, but there is no denying that Maryann knows how to throw an exciting bash. Even if she does keep getting literally left at the altar.

I admit I like a good party as much as anyone and I might have thrown a few parties which revelers still talk about. But, more and more, I feel so sorry for the beautiful life of the party who is always waiting for a man who is never going to show up and treat her right.

Would you want to party with handmaidens of Dionysus?

PS Apparently, Michelle Forbes was in a movie called Love Bites in 1993 where Adam Ant plays a vampire. I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to where to find this vamp flick.

I think Mad Men was probably my favorite television show last season. The show name Mad Men is derived from the ad men who worked on Madison Avenue in New York. The first season of the show revolved around the lives of people who work at a fictional ad agency called Sterling-Cooper in 1960. Despite the fictional nature of the agency depicted, the modern ad industry trade magazine Advertising Age put together a whole fictional issue with news bites, interviews, and profiles of fictional industry professionals. That is some mighty creative marketing.

Don Draper, the primary character on the show, is always quick with a clever word and a creative approach to marketing at work and coming up with the best personal presentation personally. In describing him, one of the his coworkers says, “nobody has ever turned over that rock; he could be Batman.” So his carefully-constructed persona has worked for getting his dream job and dream house and dream woman and dream family and a number of spare dream women, but the people he knows both professionally and personally sense that Don Draper is holding back to the point where he is somewhat unknowable.

Show creator Matthew Weiner also wrote a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and produced thirty-three episodes of The Sopranos, so it should come as no surprise that his baby Mad Men is about a lot of things with interlocking multiple storylines and complex and deep characterizations. It is always difficult to make a period piece come across as both convincing and relevant, but Mad Men succeeds brilliantly. In addition the the snappy dialog and strong set design, Katherine Jane Bryant’s costume design is nothing short of amazing in its variety, beauty, and attention to detail in character development. The award winning costume designer is best known for her work on another impressive period show, David Milch’s delightfully foul-mouthed HBO western Deadwood.

On a macro level, Mad Men is about a moment in time when America, as a nation, felt optimistic and almighty but was about to feel less so. Mad Men is about a place in American history where the role of women in society was in dramatic flux and the general population’s views on bigotry over race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation were all changing or about to be challenged. Many historians view the early 1960’s as when the country collectively held its breath before the tumultuous late 60’s clashed with the previously ordered world of the man in the gray flannel suit. Sort of a time when everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On a micro level, Mad Men is about the ways in which human relationships make us vulnerable, force us to expose ourselves, and create strife when we want a little extra privacy. On the surface, a number of the characters look like they have perfect lives, but they all struggle to keep what they have built together. Whenever the characters in Mad Men feel envy of one another, the viewer cringes, knowing what discomfort is behind those facades. This will resonate if you have ever gone to a corporate office job and done your best to make the right impression, all the while worried that somehow people can tell that you have to make the effort to come across like they do naturally.

While pitching Kodak at Sterling-Cooper, Don Draper explains that, in Greek, nostalgia means the pain from an old wound. According to the Advertising Age, err, articles, Sterling-Cooper got the account for the Kodak slide carousel after Don Draper said, “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels around and around, and back home again. To a place where we know are loved.” This pitch is from a man who has erased his early personal history and has no one left to share most memories with.

The two most common responses Mad Men evokes are laughter and a certain deep ache sort of pain. It is not entirely a feelgood series, but it is aesthetically lovely, verbally witty, and emotionally moving. New season starts tonight with a dateline of 1962, two years after season one ended. I hope season two can live up to the high expectations set by season one.

The conventional wisdom is that more people were forced to present a false front to the world in the early 1960’s than now. I’m not sure whether that is reality or wishful thinking, but I’m looking forward to season two of a show which makes me think about important questions like that.