Stephen Moyer wears an unidentified watch

In a sun-drenched courtyard by a pool, a reclining figure rests one hand on a chair arm with a watch showing at the wrist, in the lavish Louisiana mansion the show gives its vampire queen. Stephen Moyer plays Bill Compton in True Blood, Alan Ball's 2008 HBO series about vampires living openly in small-town Louisiana, and Bill is its courtly center: a Confederate soldier turned vampire in 1865, more than a century old and still trying to behave like a gentleman.

True Blood runs on the gap between the antique and the modern, creatures who remember the Civil War navigating a world of synthetic blood and cell phones. The watch in the frame is a round piece on a strap, caught at an angle where the dial never clears and no brand reads, so it stays unidentified.

Bill spends the series pulled between the human woman he loves and the vampire politics that keep dragging him back. The wristwatch is a human habit kept up by a creature who, technically, has all the time there is.