True Blood One of EW’s Best of the Year, Video with Skarsgard

Entertainment Weekly’s annual Best and Worst issue is out, with TV critic Ken Tucker ranking True Blood as the best show of 2009. Here’s what Ken had to say about his choice:

What a deep pleasure it is when a show that I admire greatly dovetails into a fan-favorite phenomenon: True Blood this season was popular culture working masterfully on all levels. Creator Alan Ball took a great commercial risk in using Charlaine Harris’ source materials — themselves big-audience best-sellers — and bending them to his own creative purposes. By doing things such as making Stephen Moyer’s Bill and Alexander Skarsgård’s Eric equal attractions for the affection of Anna Paquin’s Sookie, and keeping viewer fave Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) around for further torture and campy repartee, Ball could have alienated the Stackhouse-books diehards. Instead, the second season was a voluptuous, satirical, Southern-gothic delight. Sookie’s shape-shifting boss, Sam (Sam Trammell), went into action-hero mode, and the disclosure that vampires Bill and Eric are part of a vast, complex society of bloodsuckers gave the show more depth. Having Jason (chesty Ryan Kwanten) help expose the corruption and power lust of the Fellowship of the Sun fine-tuned both his character and the show’s satire. The stint by Michelle Forbes as a maniacal maenad demonstrated how the series can introduce and explode characters with a surging narrative force. Erotic, funny, scary, and political, Blood looks as though it’s only beginning to flex its muscle as an entertainment that uses the tiny town of Bon Temps as a microcosm of the frighteningly complicated mess we all live in.

In addition, the cast of True Blood gets the #2 spot in the Entertainer(s) of the Year category, complete with a new photoshoot (scans in the Gallery). In what must be an act of good will on earth, EW provided a behind-the-scenes video of Alexander Skarsgard’s photohoot.