• True Blood, 9-101 Sunday, HBO

''You know how many people are having sex with vampires these days?'' asks a character in True Blood. The answer is just about everybody in this new darkly witty HBO drama about lust, decadence, politics and sharp teeth.

Created by Six Feet Under producer Alan Bell and based on the Southern Vampire series of novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is an unlikely but irresistible mixture of pungent political satire, observant pop sociology and lurid drive-in thrills.

It's set in the redneck Louisiana town of Bon Temps, a couple of years after the invention of synthetic blood by a Japanese company (damned global economy!) allowed vampires to stop secretly dining on mortals and start ''coming out the coffin.'' Now the wave of vampire liberation has reached even into the back bayous of Bon Temps, which has recently acquired its first undead citizen, 173-year-old Bill Compton (veteran British TV actor Stephen Moyer).

His pallid, wasted good looks ignite the repressed but volcanic sexual tensions in honkytonk waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a virgin trapped in a hooker's body. But there's another secret to her attraction: Sookie, driven half-loopy by her unwelcome psychic ability to hear people's thoughts, gets only blissful mental silence from Compton: Technically dead, he gives off no brain waves.

The non-psychic mortals in Bon Temps are less impressed. ''You don't know how many people he's sucked the blood out of the last however many centuries he's been alive,'' warns Tara (stage actress Rutina Wesley), a black bartender hypersensitive to racial slights who sees no contradiction in her own blanket disdain for vampires. Meanwhile, Sookie's brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten, Summerland) is distracted by troubles of his own: His horndog womanizing has made him the main suspect in a murder.

Sookie and Jason aren't the only ones whose voluptuary demons have been unleashed by the vampires. From enthusiastic amateur fangbangers (vampire groupies) to canny professionals (hookers who drink synthetic blood in order to better service vampires), an entire new sexual subcultural has grown up around the undead.

In fact, it's tempting and entirely plausible to see True Blood as one extended allegory for sexual liberation, particularly when you see a vampire militant on a TV talk show demanding constitutional protections. ''We're citizens; we pay taxes,'' she declares. ``We deserve basic civil rights just like anyone else.''

But True Blood actually offers a grab-bag of metaphors, all of them a bit slippery. The vampires are not exactly a collection of helpless victims -- ''I'll [bleep] you and eat you!'' roars one quite convincingly to a perceived insult from a drunk in a convenience store -- and their militancy has a sinister single-mindedness that invites comparison to anything from Islamic fundamentalists to animal-rights crazies.

And if the anti-vampire forces are often portrayed as bigoted xenophobes, True Blood seems equally skeptical about the can't-we-all-just-get-along crowd. ''I know for a fact he supports the Vampire Rights Amendment,'' Sookie brags of one of her acquaintances. ''How progressive of him,'' replies Compton with a weary drollness.

Whether a vestal bundle of sexual inhibitions like Sookie can find happiness with a Civil War-era animated corpse is the slightly cracked question at the heart of True Blood. And though the hormonally charged naiveté of Paquin's performance will make you root for her, you'll also wonder if you should. ''I read in Hustler that everybody should have sex with a vampire once before they die,'' exclaims one wide-eyed character in True Blood. Left unspoken is the suspicion that there's a corollary: that having sex with a vampire means it won't be long before you die.

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