True Blood is biting into the Buffy effect

With its sanguine exploration of teen and twentysomething sexuality, the urban fantasy genre is going from strength to strength – a certain cheerleader would be proud
'True Blood' TV Series, Season 2 - 2009
The post-Buffy undead … True Blood. Photograph: HBO/Everett/Rex c.HBO/Everett / Rex Features/c.HBO/Everett / Rex Features

It's six years since the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was first transmitted. That, you might have thought, was that. After seven seasons, we'd surely had enough of bloodsuckers.

Except it hasn't turned out that way. It's not just that, in 2007, Dark Horse Comics unleashed "season eight" of Buffy, a direct continuation from the series, partly written by Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon. Now vamps, vamp companions and eldritch folk in general are suddenly everywhere.

In July, F/X will screen True Blood, an HBO series produced by Alan Ball. Instead of residing Six Feet Under, this time a sizeable percentage of its characters are the walking undead, vampires who have revealed themselves to humans and apparently want to join our wider community. Anna Paquin stars as Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress attracted to bloodsucker Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) in part because she can't hear his thoughts.

It's appropriate the show is based on a series of novels, the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Even as Buffy ended, writers and publishers had already spotted an opportunity.

Welcome to the world of urban fantasy. This description covers a slew of supernatural-themed books – many of which, it's worth emphasising, pre-dated Buffy's demise. Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series focuses on a reanimator who wakes the dead. Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels feature a wizard-cum-PI. Then there's Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series, Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books … the list goes on.

The new wave of eldritch has subsequently migrated to TV and the movies. As well as True Blood, we've recently had Toby Whithouse's Being Human in which a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf share a house in Bristol. In Sweden, John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel, Let the Right One in, to create an acclaimed cult vampire horror. Meyer's Twilight books have made it to the big screen.

So what's going on? Why has this collective obsession gone so far? Is it really just about missing the presence of a certain Sunnydale resident?

For one possible answer to these questions, consider a supernatural-themed show that didn't make it past a single series. ITV's Demons starred the admirable Philip Glenister, and there lay its biggest problem. Supposedly, Glenister's Rupert Galvin was an advisor to young Luke Rutherford. But Glenister dominated the series. It was if someone had reimagined Buffy with Anthony Head's Giles at its core.

Wrong. Urban fantasy, at least when it makes the leap from the genre ghetto to the mainstream, finds its audience because it places late teenage and twentysomething angst at its epicentre. It's no coincidence that vampires are so often its staple, rather than werewolves or witches, because the dangerous sexuality of bloodsuckers fits so snugly with the bedroom confusions of young adulthood.

It's for this reason that many are suspicious of Stephenie Meyer. With 42m books already sold worldwide, you can't argue with the scale of Meyer's success, but the conservative, just-say-no dynamic between Bella and her bloodsucking squeeze, Edward, deliberately desexualises urban fantasy.

There's no such squeamishness in True Blood. Just the opposite judging by the amount of flesh on show in the first episode. That doesn't mean the series is all about titillation. Rather, like Buffy, it's about a strong central character who's often underestimated: Buffy because she's a bouncy cheerleader type, Sookie because she's a kooky waitress.

There's another unavoidable comparison between Sookie and Buffy: both fancy a fella with fangs. For Sookie and Compton, think Buffy and Angel. Without wishing to suggest that True Blood doesn't stand up in its own right – the season two opener was the highest-rated show on HBO since the finale of The Sopranos – or that either character can't get by without a male presence around, some stories are just too good to drive a stake through.