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Television is incestuous. Every prestige drama is a sitcom’s bastard child, every reality show has a soap opera godparent, and sometimes a cartoon rabbit is secretly raising your favourite feminist antihero. TV doesn’t evolve in straight lines — it cannibalises itself, mutates, and dresses the same archetypes in new costumes. That’s where Unhinged TV Family Trees comes in.

On paper, one’s a supernatural HBO sexfest, the other a daytime soap with endless plot twists. But True Blood is just Days Of Our Lives with vampires and more nudity.

Days Of Our Lives ran on infidelity, resurrection, and the fine art of crying in full foundation. Nobody ever really died; they just got trapped in a coma, possessed, or recast. Swap the sand dunes of Salem for the humid swamps of Bon Temps, and you’ve basically got True Blood.

Sookie’s telepathy? That’s a soap-opera twist with better CGI. Bill’s many deaths and inconvenient revivals? Daytime déjà vu. Even the town itself is classic soap territory: a small community where everyone has slept with, betrayed, or literally bitten everyone else. HBO may have added blood and butts, but the skeleton beneath the corset was pure daytime.

Every Days episode ended on a gasp — an evil twin reveal, a door creaking open, a hand rising from the grave. True Blood lifted the same rhythm and drenched it in crimson. Each episode built to a jaw-drop: “Sookie’s a fairy,” “Bill’s the villain,” “Someone just exploded.”

That’s not prestige pacing; that’s soap pacing turned feral. It’s the melodramatic heartbeat that says, “See you tomorrow, same time, same chaos.” True Blood was simply what happens when you let a soap opera curse, moan, and bleed on premium cable.

Soap resurrection was a science long before vampire shows made it literal. Days had Dr Marlena Evans possessed by the Devil; True Blood had Lafayette possessed by witches. Both relied on the same logic: death is flexible, possession is therapy, and continuity is for cowards.

The only real difference is the budget. Daytime had fog machines and a crucifix. HBO had fangs, fog machines, and a full-body prosthetics team.

Soaps were always queer-coded. The melodrama, the excess, the glamour — it’s theatre in broad daylight. True Blooddidn’t invent camp; it inherited it. It just dropped the censorship and let the metaphors bare their throats.

When vampires picketed with “God Hates Fangs” signs, it wasn’t subtle. The show turned decades of coded soap morality — who’s pure, who’s tainted, who’s allowed love — into explicit queer allegory. Bon Temps was Salem with rights.

Lafayette himself could’ve strutted straight out of a Days dream sequence: eyeliner, sass, survivor’s heart. He was the camp conscience every soap side character dreams of being — the one who knows the rules are ridiculous and lives anyway.

Alan Ball packaged soap structure in prestige aesthetics: moody lighting, Southern Gothic monologues, naked metaphors (and naked everyone else). But the bones remained daytime. Ensemble cast. Overlapping love triangles. Moral sermons disguised as plot twists.

Even the dialogue — all those drawled endearments and whispered confessions — plays like soap cadence slowed down and dipped in bourbon. The difference between “I love you, Marlena” and “Sookeh…” is about twelve vowels and an HBO subscription.

Daytime drama taught us the language of camp: repetition, exaggeration, sincerity so heightened it turns ironic and back again. True Blood spoke that language fluently.

When Pam delivers a one-liner in blood-stained couture, she’s channeling the same energy as Days’s Vivian Alamain hiding bodies in sarcophagi. When Eric Northman lounges on his throne of neon decadence, he’s doing soap villain drag with a Swedish accent.

Even the sex scenes have soap DNA — lingering close-ups, bodies glistening with moral consequence. True Blood just traded the satin sheets for grave dirt.

What’s wild is how cyclical TV truly is. Days Of Our Lives birthed True Blood through camp lineage, and True Blood in turn influenced later “serious” dramas like Yellowjackets and Euphoria — both dripping with soap plotting and queer excess. Prestige keeps pretending it’s inventing something new, but every time a character comes back from the dead or delivers a monologue in a thunderstorm, a soap writer somewhere nods knowingly.

So yes, Days had Marlena possessed by the Devil. True Blood had Lafayette possessed by witches. Both had women screaming in chiffon, men brooding in the dark, and gods meddling in small-town affairs. One aired over lunch; the other over wine.

The lesson? The soap never dies. It just gets hotter lighting and better PR.

The DNA is unmistakable. Affairs, resurrections, cliffhangers, camp. True Blood didn’t evolve from soap opera — it was a soap opera. It simply traded hospital corridors for crypts, replaced amnesia with glamour spells, and turned Days Of Our Lives’s moral panic into HBO’s orgiastic apocalypse.

Television doesn’t evolve in straight lines. It reincarnates. It drinks the blood of its ancestors and calls it prestige.

True Blood was Days Of Our Lives after dark.