I mentioned being very disappointed in The Vampire Diaries (the first season is OK, but then it goes downhill in a hurry), and I abandoned True Blood after one season. A big part of the problem I had with both shows was how vague and sloppy they got about the supernatural--the only rule that seemed to get followed was, What's convenient for the writer right now?
Since I haven't been good for much lately, I decided to try another vampire show--Vampire Prosecutor. Not a promising title, but hey, it's Korean, so you can't really expect the English to be all that catchy.
Anyway, so far it's been great! Basically, it's a police procedural, and it reminds me a lot of the Lord Darcy stories. As the title suggests, the main character is a prosecutor (and the head of an investigative team) who just so happens to be a vampire (hey, stuff happens sometimes).
Why the show works is that it turns out that being a vampire isn't all that different from being a person, except for the whole pesky blood-lust thing. (And apparently once you start drinking blood out of people, you don't stop, so he has to keep that in check.) The vampire is fast and strong, but he's not unkillable--he takes a knife to the gut at one point and almost dies. He can go out in the sun, enter houses without permission, and cross water; he can't brainwash people, change form, or control animals.
What are his powers? Well, the vampire can smell blood, which is very helpful in his line of work. If he vamps out at the scene of a violent death, he gets flashes of how that death happened. If he drinks the blood of the dead person, he can see what they saw as they died--and then he experiences the pain of dying, which kind of sucks.
The visions can be helpful, or they can be useless (so, he just experienced the pain of dying for no reason--oops), or they can be totally misleading. Even when they're helpful, they cause problems--there's one other person on the investigative team who knows that this guy's a vampire, but everyone else is getting increasingly irritated by these seemingly-random decisions to stop investigating Viable Suspect A and to start investigating Apparent Dead End B. (And sometimes their skepticism is totally warranted, because sometimes the visions are misleading!)
Anyway, it's a great example of the benefits of putting limits and rules on magic. It also helps that, so far, there hasn't been the spread of supernatural beings that afflicted Vampire Diaries and True Blood--there are vampires, and that's it. Everything else is just normal human agency.