Will ‘True Blood’ be cable hit?

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Vampires are hot, but what about vampire reruns?

HBO will find out soon enough. The pay-cable channel is starting to shop repeats of “True Blood” to commercial cable networks.

The show, which just started its third season, has turned into HBO’s biggest hit since the days of “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.” About 12 million viewers tune in to each episode to watch Sookie Stackhouse and vampire Bill Compton get hot and sweaty down in Bon Temps, La., while battling evil vampires, wolves and the occasional redneck. “True Blood’s” Sunday night average is about 5.5 million viewers. HBO runs the show throughout the week and offers it via its on-demand channel.

The popularity of the show should make for an easy sale. But there are red flags that potential buyers should be aware of, and they don’t all have to do with the high level of sex and violence on “True Blood.”

HBO has done a very good job getting big bucks for reruns of its shows. However, the shows themselves haven’t always performed as well as buyers might have hoped.

The most recent example of this is Spike, which shelled out $600,000 per episode for reruns of “Entourage,” only to see it struggle on its network. The series premiered on Spike in January, and since then the network has tried it on four nights with less than stellar results.

Another HBO show that cost a lot but didn’t deliver for the buyer was “Six Feet Under,” which Bravo paid $250,000 an episode to acquire. It didn’t last too long there, and now Bravo parent NBC Universal is burning off the purchase on its little-seen cable network Universal HD.

The money spent on those two shows is chump change when compared with the roughly $2.6 million per episode A&E coughed up for “The Sopranos.” The mob drama had a strong A&E premiere, drawing 4.4 million viewers, but more than half were gone just two months later.

HBO hopes it can sell “True Blood” for $800,000 per episode. Cable networks should be careful or they might end up with all their blood drained.