{alltv} Witches brew delectable trouble on 'True Blood'

True Blood is truly a paragon of otherworldly diversity.

This season, witches join the fourth-season HBO drama (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), a cauldron of vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, fairies, shapeshifters and, once upon a time, maenads in rural Bon Temps, La.

"There's never a dull moment in our little town," says Anna Paquin, who plays Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic fairy/human hybrid at the center of Blood and the Charlaine Harris novels on which the series is based. The different creatures "all come with their unique sets of gifts and problems, and it certainly makes for an exciting world for our viewers and for Sookie."

When Season 3 ended, Sookie (Anna Paquin) had split with longtime vampire beau Bill (Stephen Moyer, who is married to Paquin), was on the outs with vampire Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and had gone off with a mysterious woman; Bill and Eric had buried their antagonist, vampire king Russell Edgington (Denis O'Hare); and Bill and Queen Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood) were about to do battle.

Sookie's dismissal of Bill and Eric represents another step in the once-naive character's growth, Paquin says.

"She tells them to go to hell, literally," she says. "It means she's done being messed with. Those boys have been nothing but trouble, some fun trouble along the way, but ultimately there's been some major stuff that has happened that has been problematic since vampires walked into her life."

That doesn't mean she's done with them.

Season 4 finds Sookie off in the fairy world and Bill and Eric perceiving a threat from a coven leader, the seemingly unthreatening Wiccan Marnie (Fiona Shaw), who has drawn in Jesus (Kevin Alejandro) and Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis).

Marnie's magic causes Eric to lose his memory, throwing him into a confused state much removed from his usual confident self. Her power to raise the dead could be problematic for the undead — i.e., vampires.

"I think the writers wanted to try to find something that could weaken a vampire or control a vampire in some way," Moyer says. "The witches are a conduit for something that hasn't been around for 400 years. They represent something that can have control over vampires that is very threatening."

With the witches, Blood also becomes a bastion of equal opportunity. "What the witches bring us is the idea of magic being available to humans," executive producer Alan Ball says. "It's not just the realm of supernatural creatures, of creatures who were born into it. Characters who are human can find themselves being part of a group on this wild mission against vampires, which up to this point would have seemed like a suicide mission."

Despite Bon Temps' boom in the occult population, Ball doesn't think there are too many characters or stories for the audience to digest. And ratings — the initial airing of each episode averaged 5 million viewers last season, up 16% from the season before — suggest fans can handle it. Besides, there are always fewer characters standing as each season progresses.

"It is a violent show, so we cull the herd at least once a season," Ball says. "It's dangerous to live in Bon Temps."