It seems like too much futile work in the heat of August  work bound to lead only to phony conclusions  to decipher how the sanguivorous have become the meat and drink of popular culture at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Though here we are in the summer of 2009 with the rage for “Twilight” continuing, the vampire movie “Thirst” claiming this year’s jury prize at Cannes, the supernatural series “Being Human” on BBC America, and others arriving on CW and AMC.

HBO’s “True Blood” has been credited with revivifying the channel’s fortunes. The Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which inspired the series, currently occupy seven of the top 20 spots on The New York Times’s paperback mass-market fiction best-seller list. The show, a mishmash of Flannery O’Connor aspirations and Anne Rice pop blood hunger, threatens to surpass “Sex and the City” as the most-watched series in HBO’s history after “The Sopranos.”

Image Anna Paquin plays the mind-reading Sookie Stackhouse and Stephen Moyer the vampire Bill Compton in True Blood, on HBO. Credit... John P. Johnson

But “True Blood” is nothing like its mob-world forebear or anything else on HBO. Where “The Sopranos” had restraint and vast ambition, “True Blood” has excess and gall. During the current season, its second (the penultimate episode will be shown on Sunday), it has become an allegory for nearly every strain of tension in American life, despite a premise that suggested a more contained agenda. When “True Blood” appeared, it was easy to assume it was a metaphor for late-stage capitalism gone haywire, not simply because it began with an insolent store clerk reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” but also because the show seemed predicated on an interest in the retail addict’s belief that we’re made of what we buy.