Spoiler Alert -- If you haven't read the books or watched "True Blood," and don't want to know until you watch it for yourself, don't go any further.
I'm going to get back to reading the books after I finish "Going Rogue." But for now, here are my thoughts.
So far, the first two seasons have focused on the first two books (with some interesting changes). After having read the third book, I have come to the conclusion that they can no longer keep Bubba in the shadows any longer and have to bring him out next season.
If you haven't read the books, you may be asking "Who is Bubba?" Well, in the books, "Bubba" is Elvis Presley in vampire form, although they never refer to him specifically as "Elvis Presley." In the books, the story goes that when Elvis was in the morgue, the coroner was a vampire who happened to be a big fan. He sensed some life coming out of him, so he thought he would do him a favor and "turn" him. Unfortunately, the process in his case basically made him "simple minded" (possibly because of the amount of drugs in his system at the time).
Because of his condition and the fact that they can't let him out in public with the other vampires (because everytime they do it gets reported to the tabloids, thus all the reports of "sightings"), the vampires between three states have passed him around as an errand boy. Again, because of his mental condition he takes things VERY literally, so you have to be careful what you tell him. He also has a penchant for house pets (in particular cats), can get really means, and gets upset when you call him by his former name.
He's introduced in the first book, Dead Until Dark, when Bill goes out of town and has Bubba watch Sookie in case the killer came to her house. In the third book, Club Dead, Eric asks Bubba to watch over Sookie for the night until her escort to Mississippi, werewolf Alcide Herveaux, picks her up the next day. But Eric forgets to tell him it was for the one night, so Bubba ends up following them to Mississippi, continuing to "protect" Sookie. In one scene in the book, Alcide and Sookie find a dead werewolf named Jerry Lawson in their closet, thinking that someone was trying to frame Alcide for his murder. Later in the book, after remembering that Bubba followed them from Josephine's to the King of Mississippi's home, we discover that Bubba was the one to kill Jerry because he watched him break in to Alcide's apartment, and he promptly killed him, sticking his body in the closet figuring that Alcide and Sookie would know what to do with the body.
Just based on that, they have to bring Bubba in to the show.
Anyway, a lot of the differences I found with the show vs. the first two books so far has been interesting. By the end of the third book, Sookie and Bill have broken up because Bill cheated on her with his "maker" Lorena. I know that "True Blood" creator Alan Ball said that he wouldn't have them break up, so having Bill kidnapped at the end of last season might be a way to change the plot point so that they do stay together.
In fact, there are a lot of plot points they changed when translating the books to the television show. For example:
-- In the books, Jason never joins The Fellowship of the Sun, and is relatively supportive of her relationship with Bill.
-- In the books, Lafayette died in Living Dead in Dallas. They kept him alive in the show, and are using him for more interesting plot devices.
-- In the books, Bill Compton is the great-great-great grandfather of Andy Bellefleur. It's never mentioned in the series.
-- Also in the series, the reason that Bill has to leave town in the first season while the serial killer is on the loose is because of his killing Longshadow (in the book, Eric kills him), with his punishment being that he has to "turn" another vampire, who would turn out to be the teenage Jessica. In the book, it's because he's running for (and wins) the position of investigator in Area 5 in order to keep Eric away from Sookie.
-- Jessica is not in the books -- she was created just for the show. She's a teenaged vampire who is "turned" and suddenly becomes a wild child. She ends up dating Hoyt Fortenberry.
-- Speaking of Hoyt: in the books, Maxine Fortenberry is his grandmother, not his mother. And their characters are, again, more developed in the show. One of the drawbacks of the books is that a lot of these characters aren't as developed because it's all told from Sookie's point of view.
-- The plotline with the maenad in Living Dead in Dallas is not a big of a characteristic as it became in the second season of the show. In the book, a maenad named Callipso is just coming through Bon Temps and sends a message (via Sookie) to Eric that she's looking for tribute, then later she gets into a brief fling with Sam and kills three of the partygoers at the sex party they go to because they killed Lafayette. In the show, the maenad goes by the name Maryann Forrester, and wants Sam to sacrifice to her Horned God.
There are also a lot of little changes, too, which I'm not going to go in to here. Some minor characters got made into major ones, like Tara, for example.
The one thing I can't see at this point is the plotline of Club Dead happening in season 3 as far as Bill's kidnapping. Since Lorena made an appearance this season, he made it clear that he no longer loves Lorena and wants nothing to do with her. Plus the fact that the season ended with Bill proposing to Sookie. I can't see the TV Bill being disloyal to Sookie in any way.
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