Interview With the Vampire: The Underrated Gem of Television
Television Interview With the Vampire Is the Best Show Almost Nobody Is Watching
There’s one thing—OK, two—preventing this drama from becoming the hit it’s meant to be.
Perhaps no channel better encapsulates what my colleague Sam Adams defined as the end of Peak TV and the start of Trough TV like AMC and its neglected streaming arm AMC+, a service that is unfamiliar to virtually everyone I know. Gone are the days of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and even Better Call Saul, which ended two years ago with less fanfare than you would think. Now AMC mainly treats us to an ever-expanding roster—six and counting, by my estimation—of uneven spin-offs of The Walking Dead. Middling zombie IP can only take you so far; where’s the next great show from the former network titan of prestige programming? The answer is a series that has been here all along and is, in fact, well into its second season: Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire.
AMC’s adaptation of Rice’s popular 1976 gothic horror-romance novel starts with a journalist. After an encounter gone near fatally wrong half a century prior, cynical Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) sits down for another interview with the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), formerly a gay Black Creole human man who suffered a toxic relationship with the unstable, intemperate, manipulative yet alluringly captivating vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) some years ago. Louis, at this point almost 150 years old, seeks to tell Daniel his life story, which had long starred Lestat but instead currently centers his current paramour, the ancient vampire Armand (Assad Zaman). Daniel feels that, with Louis’ tale, he may well have his final book on his hands.
Season 1 was warmly received by critics. Although one might expect the show to be dripping in soapy melodrama, akin to that of the Brad Pitt–and–Tom Cruise–led cult classic 1994 film adaptation, today’s Interview is praised as much more well balanced. Sure, the melodrama is still there—after all, it’s a series about gay vampires who just can’t quit each other—but unlike the 1994 movie, it’s not all camp all the time. For one, the show doesn’t shy away from the expressly romantic nature of Louis and Lestat’s bond. Compellingly portraying such a relationship—one that is mired in deep emotional abuse and manipulation, that is a constant push and pull between a union of comfort and understanding vs. one of possessiveness—is no easy task. But Anderson’s and Reid’s deft performances carry the genuine love that persists between the fanged, damaged men, underneath the weight of all the things that seek to suffocate it.
When the show isn’t taking on the nuanced ins and outs of abusive couplings, it’s taking on the ins and outs of race, having made Louis’ origin story one of a Black gay man trying to become a successful entrepreneur in the Jim Crow South of 1910 New Orleans. There is nuance aplenty amid the drama, giving the audience both a morality and a mortality to consider. Existence is hard, the show declares, and any manner of making it easier comes with its own set of demons. You just have to decide which is the devil you can live with.
What elevates the entire series for me isn’t the Louis–Lestat pairing but Daniel Molloy. We all know Bogosian plays the perfect cynic—who else could deliver the famous line “You can’t make a Tomelet without breaking some Greggs” in Succession with such gravitas?—but AMC’s version of Daniel is rich and complex. He’s a no–B.S.–taking recovering addict with Parkinson’s disease; by his own account, he ruined his marriage and his kids, but he still has the fire of a legendary journalist. Daniel’s real-world pessimism and his Anthony Bourdain–esque skepticism elevate Interview, providing a much-needed foil for the self-indulgence of the vampiric tale. But he remains layered in that role, at once defiant and vulnerable, curious and terrified. He also has palpable chemistry with Louis, making you wonder what really happened between them nearly 50 years ago.
Season 2, now at its midway point, continues to shine. It follows Louis and Claudia (portrayed by Bailey Bass in Season 1 and Delainey Hayles in Season 2), a 14-year-old who was turned into a vampire by Lestat at Louis’ request. The pair are grappling with Claudia’s now-perpetual adolescence and Louis’ love-blindness, which left them both vulnerable to Lestat’s abuse. They flee New Orleans to navigate Europe, looking for other vampires to fall in with—good ones, hopefully, though an underlying theme of Interview is that you can never be sure. Louis is struggling to inhabit the father/older brother role he wants to take on for Claudia, allowing the show to tackle the idea of family: what it is and isn’t, what it should and shouldn’t be. Where Season 1 explored what it means to dive into something—sexuality, vampirism, the usual—Season 2 is about getting over something, if that is possible.
But for all of the things AMC’s Interview is—a prestige drama, a rumination on love and life, a campy fantasy romp—a hit it is not. Both seasons have received low ratings, prompting concerns, from the viewers who do care, over the show’s chances of survival. The series has a passionate fan base, but it is, to borrow a turn of phrase from culture critic Bobbi Miller, a prestige show with a CW audience. As you may be aware, the CW—the replacement network for the WB and UPN—is responsible for shows like Riverdale, The Vampire Diaries, Nancy Drew, and Gilmore Girls. A CW audience, then, is a small but mighty group of fans who fawn over romance, teen, and fantasy television. They’re the fun fans, the ones who make fan edits and Tumblr GIF sets, who write fan fiction and create “ships” between characters. These fans are often assumed to be younger, though I’m sure I’m not alone among the members of this group pushing 30. Given Interview With the Vampire’s soapy subject matter, it’s not a shock that it has attracted a CW-like audience. The beautiful thing about that kind of following is its passion—but, as with many groups coded as young and female, it is rarely taken seriously, and is often looked down upon by the viewers, critics, and executives who are looking for so-called serious prestige creations.
Make no mistake: Interview With the Vampire is one of the best shows currently on television. The plot is easier to follow than the convoluted narrative swamp of the Game of Thrones universe, the acting is better than that of most other shows on the air, and the writing is solid. The series has something for everyone, but not everyone is tuning in, whether it’s because they’re making assumptions about the type of show it is or because it’s on freaking AMC+. People keep bemoaning the lack of good TV these days—well, the answer is right there, waiting for its big moment, under constant threat of cancellation.
