WHAT would happen if vampires no longer needed to suck human blood because they could pop into the 7/11 and buy a six pack of synthetic blood whenever they were Jonesing for a bite?

If HBO’s new vampire show is any indication, there would still be countless deaths – especially among vampire hunters and the viewers who love them – because everyone would be dying of boredom.

And so it is with HBO’s new series from death-obsessed Alan Ball, creator of the legendary “Six Feet Under,” whose new show “True Blood,” won’t so much make your blood run cold as it willleave you cold.

The series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris takes place in the not-too-distant future in the backwater Louisiana town of Bon Temps, where the newly-liberated vampires are trying to assimilate with humans. While the vampires are no longer voracious, the humansare. For sex.

In place of Anne Rice-ian vampire erotica, we get humans having very rough, very graphic, very ugly looking sex – constantly. Apparently everyone in town loves it at all hours of the day and night.

The series revolves around Sookie (Anna Paquin), a waitress/mindreader at Merlotte’s, a roadhouse filled with nasty-ass employees and worse customers.

Right off, Sookie takes a shine to handsome 173-year-old vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), although “shine” is probably a bad word because even though vampires can walk among us – they can still do so only at night.

Sookie, for reasons never explained, manages to save Bill in episode one from a horrifying beat down by two vampire hunters (like the KKK, they don’t believe in integration) by jumping in and nearly killing them herself.

Meantime, her brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten), a sex addict, is wrongly accused of killing a woman during rough sex and leaving her tied up. Despite being a dim wit, he seems to find every woman’s door – not to mention her legs – is always open for him. In the first couple of episodes, he has sex with at least four women. The whole thing is very gratuitous, verging-on-creepy porn when it’s not verging on extremely gratuitous violence.

Other characters include Sookie’s best friend, a stereotyped “sassy” black waitress named Tara (Rutina Wesley); Lafayette (Nelson Ellis), the very gay chef; and Sookie’s grandmother, played by Lois Smith. These three are the best part of the whole series.

Go get a big garlic necklace and hang it on your TV screen to keep these biteless vamps away from your door.

. . . But I’m betting that now you can’t wait to watch it!