Emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel like any schlub commuter, Tony Soprano sucks a big cigar as he drives his SUV through the stinky Jersey suburbs on his way to his mini-mansion. Just another guy trying to stay ahead of the Joneses was one of The Sopranos' themes.

The titles in HBO's new vampire series, True Blood, show a slew of quick images including a dead opossum, a Venus flytrap clutching a clueless frog, and a time-lapse sequence of a mangy mammal decomposing.

The show, premiering tomorrow at 9 p.m., is ugly and fixated on death and violence. There's lots of lurid sex, too, reflected in other title images.

There's also creativity and flat-out breathtaking acting to instill a voyeuristic fascination and perhaps inspire a fanatic, if small, audience - especially considering that the series is based on the Southern Vampire Mysteries of Charlaine Harris.

"I really, really want her fans to be fans of the show," series creator and executive producer Alan Ball (who will bring some fans of his own from Six Feet Under) told TV critics at their summer meeting in Los Angeles.

"But," said Ball, who has crafted his first season from the first Vampire book, Dead Until Dark, "at a certain point, you have to make a separation and make the show that you believe is the best."

That show stars Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar at age 11 for The Piano and is jaw-dropping 15 years later as Sookie (rhymes with "cookie") Stackhouse, a backwoods Louisiana waitress who reads minds.

It's not just that she can read minds. It's that other people's thoughts intrude into her brain. Distracted for no reason apparent to the outside world, she often presents herself as crazy or retarded and has been unable to develop intimate relationships.

No wonder she falls for Billy Compton, around whom she finds some peace, though the reason for that - he's a vampire; he has no brainwaves - leads to other complications. A serious one: Some of his friends want to suck her dry.

Billy walks into her bar one night, all brooding and way past handsome, and orders a glass of TruBlood, the new Japanese synthetic that has allowed vamps to live openly, since they no longer have to murder humans to survive.

Stephen Moyer (another British import best known as the beautiful beach boy Sam in USA's The Starter Wife) does a great job, too, as an Angel-esque vamp trying to hang on to human values. When Paquin and Moyer do a two-shot, which is often, the screen shimmers.

Ball said he didn't base Billy on Angel (the gorgeous good-guy vamp played by Philly's own David Boreanaz, who got his start on Buffy the Vampire Slayer), or any previous star in the pantheon of undead bloodsuckers.

"This was really my first foray into the world of vampires," he said. But he did know enough to make fun of CBS's recently canceled Moonlight. "I think it's pretty lame when you let your vampire go out in the day just because you don't want to shoot at night."

Ball's rural Louisiana wonderland is dark and drippy, inhabited by a world of weird day- and nighttime characters who might grow on you.

The most well-adjusted is a gay short-order cook/road worker who sells drugs, including real vampire blood (it works a world of wonders), out of the house where he also hustles tricks with state officials.

"Don't let nothing get you down," he tells his misanthropic cousin, whose inspired screeds against the insipid folks who intrude on her psychic solitude are part of the show's copious humor. "It's the only way to live."

HBO has been down since the screen went dark on The Sopranos. True Blood has little of the mainstream appeal of that series, but its exotic inspiration and similarly oblique examination of some of the markers of a normal life - love, family, social acceptance - may signal a turn in the network's fortunes.

Jonathan Storm:

True Blood

Tomorrow night at 9 on HBO