FRESH FEAST

A Kansas wife and mother faces down four problematic characters, all of them facets of her own shattered personality. In California, a charming former con man uses his manipulative powers for good instead of gain. In Washington, D.C., a doctor has developed a method to decipher what people are really saying, despite their words. In Louisiana, vampires fight for equal rights; in Botswana, a woman sets up a detective agency in her quiet little town. And in small-town North Carolina, a foul-mouthed baseball burnout teaches PE to middle schoolers.

These series -- Showtime’s “United States of Tara,” CBS’ “The Mentalist,” Fox’s “Lie to Me” and three from HBO: “True Blood,” “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” and “Eastbound & Down” -- are all rookie shows that have broken free of the first-season pack. Not only are they getting ratings that will likely guarantee a second season -- they’re also gleaning critical acclaim, an ever-rarer combination in series television.

All of them are, ultimately, about discovery, more overtly, of course, with the detective series but also in unexpected ways with the others. In “Tara,” the lead is trying to uncover the roots of her disorder; “Blood” is a murder mystery set amid clashing cultures; and in “Eastbound,” well, let’s just say he’s currently discovering life outside the limelight, but we hope something more enlightening heads his way soon.

So what is it about these shows that clicks? Across the next few pages, the stars and creators weigh in with theories on why the shows are hitting with audiences and, in the process, reveal why they were drawn to the material themselves.

--

‘TRUE BLOOD’ SO IT’S AN ACQUIRED TASTE

When it comes to HBO’s swampy Southern Goth horror story, “True Blood,” about a feisty, telepathic waitress who charms the fangs off a Southern gent cum vampire with excellent sideburns, Emmy voters might not want to cry “camp” too quickly.

The Charlaine Harris book series, as re-imagined by “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball, is a political satire, romance and murder mystery set in a world where vampires don’t need to feed on humans -- but sometimes do -- and where the buxom Sookie Stackhouse is the literal center of the action.

During the first season, she is pursued by a killer and courted by both a 173-year-old vampire named Bill and her tender boss, Sam (not a werewolf but a shape-shifter), all while having to deal with dead bodies piling up around her, the vile thoughts of her vampire-hating human clientele and a brother addicted to sex and vampire blood, a potent hallucinogen.

“It’s powerful and moving and scary and completely crazy,” says Anna Paquin, who says she stalked Ball for the part of Sookie. “Our show is definitely not for everyone, but all of us who work on it are obsessed.”

The mix is an acquired taste, to be sure, but ratings for the show indicate a growing group of thrill seekers. According to HBO, the “True Blood” audience started small but grew throughout the season.

Chasing after the role has already paid off for Paquin. She won a Golden Globe for lead actress in January, and, unlike other Hollywood actors who feign indifference about award season, she doesn’t quickly dismiss it.

“Obviously, I’m really grateful for [award season] as a concept. If I hadn’t won an Oscar when I was, like, 11, I’m guessing I wouldn’t have a career right now,” the actress says. In 1993, she became the second youngest performer in history to win an Oscar for her portrayal of a child translating for her mute mother in Jane Campion’s “The Piano.”

It will likely be more of an uphill battle for “True Blood” when it comes to Emmy voters, a group long spooked by genre shows, snubbing critical favorites like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” season after season. But timing could be on its side. Season 2 premieres June 14, less than two weeks before nomination ballots are due, and the intensity hasn’t let up. Sookie and her vampire suitor are now the adoptive “parents” to Jessica, the teen Bill was forced to turn into a vampire as punishment for killing another vampire.

“Trouble, as usual,” Paquin says. “But if you already watch the show, you know that’s going to be the least of it.”

-- Denise Martin

--

‘LIE TO ME’ THE TRUTH THAT GOES UNSAID

Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) has developed a process by which one can tell from reading a person’s facial expressions whether that person’s lying, or embarrassed, or contemptuous, or just about any other emotion. He and his colleagues, who include Kelli Williams (“The Practice”), solve cases by analyzing what witnesses aren’t saying. As they work, Roth notes, “We carry the audience with us; they’re part of the team. They learn something in the process of solving the whodunit.” So the familiar procedural is given a cool scientific twist.

And as creator Samuel Baum points out, “Most people are inherently interested in busting liars.”

The show’s science is based on the work of Dr. Paul Ekman. When Baum first came across Ekman’s research, he said it was “mindblowing. There is a language of the truth being spoken all over the world in our faces and bodies and voices, and no matter what we say with our words, our faces always betray what we’re actually feeling. And that language is universal.”

Indeed, in one of the most entertaining conceits, the show periodically flashes photos of public figures -- such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, disgraced former New York Gov. Eliot M. Spitzer -- bearing expressions of contempt, shame or anger that viewers get to “read.” “That’s one of the things that was very funny in the pilot and has really succeeded,” Roth says, “because we can talk about it as much as we care to, but when you actually show the real evidence of it, it’s quite extraordinary.”

Roth has no interest in picking up his character’s skill set, however. Though he met with Ekman in researching his character, he didn’t train to learn how to read faces.

“As Paul told me, ‘Once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it,’ ” Roth says. “There are so many critics out there, I’d rather be unaware of quite how many there are, you know.”

-- Lisa Rosen

--

‘THE MENTALIST’ ADVENTURES IN WEIRD SCIENCE

Mentalist: Someone who uses mental acuity, hypnosis, and/or suggestion. A master manipulator of thoughts and behavior.

With that definition onscreen, the show unfolds. Mentalist Patrick Jane is a reader of people, but he relies on intuition and trickery rather than scientific inquiry to get to the answers.

He also has a surprising lack of judgment of the criminals he questions. He might ask someone if she killed her son with the same lightness of tone with which he’d offer her a cup of tea.

For a team of agents at the California Bureau of Intelligence office in Sacramento, the natural order of things -- rules, regulations, hierarchy -- is constantly upset by his presence, even while his skills invariably help solve cases.

As Simon Baker eloquently puts it, “he’s constantly trying to spark up a thought coup d’etat” with his police compatriots.

As creator Bruno Heller describes it, the procedural format provides a comforting arena to viewers, while the mentalist elements “allow you a great deal of fun leeway in terms of what happens from week to week, which allows us to surprise the audience.” He adds that it all works because “Simon is a genuine TV star come into his own with this show. I hate to use words like ‘magic,’ but he does have a magic onscreen.”

For his part, Baker enjoys the challenge of creating a character “that is both mass-appeal network-likable and at the same time slightly wrong.” A darker element underlies Jane’s lightness and ease. His earlier days as a con man attracted the attention of a serial killer who killed his family and is still at large; Jane’s detective work serves as both penance and vengeance.

Heller says the ultimate goal is to “just try to grab the audience and amuse them, which is a somewhat old-fashioned kind of vaudeville way of looking at TV.” Adds Baker, “It’s got comedy and drama and pathos, but it doesn’t indulge too much in any of them.”

-- Lisa Rosen

--

‘EASTBOUND & DOWN’ FUN, GAMES AND SELF-DELUSION

“Eastbound & Down” executive producer Jody Hill specializes in a particular kind of jerky, self-deluded hero. You laugh at his expense, but you also feel for him when things don’t work out.

In his low-budget sleeper hit “The Foot Fist Way,” it was puffed up taekwondo instructor Fred Simmons. In the Seth Rogen-headlined “Observe and Report,” it was bipolar security guard Ronnie Barnhardt. And in Hill’s HBO comedy “Eastbound & Down,” it is Kenny Powers, a lewd, crude baseball has-been with a curly mullet and ideas of self-grandeur that wreak havoc on his hometown in North Carolina after he’s booted from the major leagues.

Hill calls it “a sort of low-brow epic story,” having less in common with sports film conventions than with the Greek tragedies.

“It’s funny, we don’t actually know anything about sports,” he says of himself and star and executive producer Danny McBride. “Most of who Kenny is comes from celebrity culture and the idea of a fallen hero.”

A really, really abrasive one. Over the series’ six-episodes -- with each episode picking up at the very moment the last one left off -- Kenny does a lot of drugs, imposes on his family, insults his fans and goes about wooing his high school sweetheart by complimenting her chest.

Kenny’s lost his pitching skills, yet he lets himself get goaded into being the main attraction at a car dealership event (with the salesman played by a series executive producer, Will Ferrell). Taking a job as a PE teacher at his former middle school, he tries to steal a chance at the pros from a high school player.

“I don’t think people are bad, but some of them tend to view themselves as the main characters in their own movies,” Hill says. “We magnify that for the comedy, but we tried to make all the characters and stories work like they would in a ‘serious’ movie.”

-- Denise Martin

--

‘UNITED STATES OF TARA’ A VEHICLE FOR MULTIPLE STORIES

The names above the title were enough to attract savvy viewers. Executive producers Steven Spielberg and Diablo Cody created “Tara,” the story of a wife and mother with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) who decides to go off her meds to get to the source of her problem. As a result, when faced with stress, she turns into one of four “alters” -- ‘50s housewife Alice, teenage troublemaker “T,” Buck, a macho jerk, and an animalistic creature named Gimme, who actually makes Buck look good.

Tying them all together is Toni Collette, who never thought she’d find herself at the head of a television family but couldn’t resist after reading the pilot. Though she acknowledges that a show sometimes “will tick all the boxes and yet flop,” she attributes “Tara’s” appeal to “its originality, its frankness, its honesty and humor.”

Cody, on the other hand, attributes it to her lead actress. “Toni Collette is a movie star. I think people tune in to see her,” she insists. “I can’t think of a better actress on television. She gave a lot of humanity to a character that in lesser hands could have almost seemed like just that, a character. Sketch comedy at its worst.”

Cody goes on to laud Brie Larson and Keir Gilchrist, who play Tara’s children, Kate and Marshall, and John Corbett, who plays her husband, Max. “John is somebody that people have no qualms about welcoming into their homes,” she says.

For a woman dealing with a major, potentially destructive issue, Tara is part of a family that is remarkably close and loving without being remotely perfect.

“It’s nice to feel you can watch people like you and me on TV,” Collette says. “Just because Tara has DID doesn’t make her a leper. People see themselves in this family and connect.”

-- Lisa Rosen

--

‘THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY’ NO GUNS?

“The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” is not your typical HBO drama. There is no swearing, no scenes of graphic violence, no racy sex (or even sex talk). There aren’t even any guns.

Instead, there is cozy crime-solving, one large-and-in-charge detective, Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott), and lots of red bush tea.

The series, a co-production between HBO and the BBC, was the last project director Anthony Minghella worked on before his death in March 2008. He produced, directed and co-wrote the pilot, having fallen in love several years earlier with Alexander McCall Smith’s books about the adventures of Botswana’s first and only female P.I. The show was shot entirely on location in Botswana, the first of its kind.

In the first episode, Precious sets up shop in Botswana’s bustling capital of Gaborone because, after a disastrous marriage and her father’s death, she wants to “help people with the problems in their lives.” She hires top-scoring secretary Grace Makutsi and begins to solve the mysteries of a missing finger, a dubious daddy and a cheating husband.

The caseload is light by most crime procedural standards, but it’s the people and spirit of daily life in Gaborone that have made the characters beloved since the book series’ 1999 debut.

“In many ways, this show is as brave, if not braver, than most American dramas,” show-runner Timothy Bricknell says. “It’s the first prime-time drama out of Africa with all black characters. Just portraying a positive side of Africa is something people have never seen before. I don’t think it’s out of place on HBO at all. Without having an overtly political agenda, it encourages us to think about Africa a little bit differently,” he says.

Precious is a big, bright, patient woman who drives around in a pickup and relies on a book, “The Principles of Private Detection,” as her official instruction manual.

“I think it’s important that TV has a wonderful lead character who’s a woman, not in her early 20s and not a size 0,” Bricknell says. “She’s clever and tough and black. It’s significant.”

-- Denise Martin

--

calendar@latimes.com