Thanks to the magic of union screeners, over the weekend I finally caught up on the third season of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire. The first two seasons split the titular book in half, while the third, which aired in June and July, renamed itself The Vampire Lestat and tackled Anne Rice’s 1985 book of the same name. Despite having watched the whole thing over the course of a few days, I have absolutely no idea exactly what it was.
As a young person–honestly, looking back, maybe a little too young–I was absolutely obsessed with Rice’s books, which I found out about after the Interview with the Vampire movie came out in 1994. I wasn’t allowed to see the movie, though once it came to TV I’d figure out when it was airing from the listings and then sneak downstairs to watch it whenever it was on. (I really thought I was pulling one over on my parents, but surely they knew!) Despite forbidding the movie, my parents did buy me all the books, and I destroyed those mass market paperbacks through repeated rereadings. I fell off the series after 1995’s Memnoch the Devil, a book I didn’t realize came out so early until just now–Rice’s world feels like it defined a lengthy segment of my childhood, but it couldn’t have been more than a year or so.
Without going into details that will embarrass me on the internet, I can see now that much of what resonated with me about the books ties into my gender and sexuality, but I didn’t have any kind of words for those things at the time. And even though the books meant the world to me back then, I’ve never gone back to them as an adult lest I either explode from cringing or dig up childhood trans trauma I don’t have the fortitude to unpack. I was deeply leery of the AMC show when it began in 2022; I put off watching it for a long time, not sure I wanted to see something that felt so personal to me exist outside my memory.
When I finally did watch Interview with the Vampire, I was relieved that it was great: thoughtful and modern in all the right ways, pulling out interesting themes from its source material while taking liberties that elevated the whole thing. But when the first two seasons ended, I feared for the rest of the adaptation: To my mind, The Vampire Lestat starts to introduce the supernatural themes that ultimately lead the story to kind of jump the shark. 1988’s The Queen of the Damned was probably the book I reread the least, and while there’s a human element to 1992’s The Tale of the Body Thief that made it very moving to me, I felt like the series ultimately moved too far away from the emotion that grounded its vampire roots and just became ridiculous.
And, perhaps true to my fears, AMC’s The Vampire Lestat is fucking ridiculous. The first episode listed in the screeners was a recording of a concert that aired after the series, and I only got through about 10 minutes of it before it felt so stupid that I just started watching the series proper. I don’t envy the challenge the creators faced of having to actually write the songs for the book’s band, especially given how much music has changed since the novel came out. And while the show modernizes the series to 2025, the songs themselves didn’t feel to me like the kind of music that would be popular now, making the whole thing feel a step out of time in a way that clashed with how the band was portrayed, though at the same time gave the show an off-kilter feeling that helped create its very particular vibe. I have long held a belief that there is no piece of media in which a character needs to write a song where the song is ever good, and I’d say that so far, this belief remains unchallenged.
Despite being someone who reread The Vampire Lestat until I had to hold my book together with rubber bands, I feel like I had no idea what was going on in the show 90% of the time. It leaps dizzyingly back and forth through time, hinting at events and exploring them in pieces. I quickly got mixed up as to who everyone was and why specifically they were all mad at each other, and while I think this structure made it a lot more interesting than just a chronological recounting of Lestat’s life, I frequently considered that if someone like me couldn’t follow it, someone encountering the story for the first time would probably be pretty frustrated.
Things went better for me when I just let go of the expectation of narrative and tried to see it less as a TV show and more an experience. It’s a rush of arresting, often lovely, often gory images (especially the end–honestly, maybe too gory, bordering on ridiculous in a way that risked ruining the emotional catharsis it was going for). It feels globe-trotting and time-spanning, with embarrassing modern lingo threaded throughout that kept me off-balance in an enjoyable way. It sometimes felt edgy just for the sake of it (if you’ve seen it, you know!), but at the same time, this did feel true to Lestat’s character in the book and the rest of the series. I think the series wants to be a kind of character study that I’m not sure it fully earns, especially in scenes where characters say things that sound pretty but don’t quite feel like they have ground beneath them. But the show definitely creates the experience of being inside the brain and skin of someone who is very much not human, and spits you back out again feeling like you’ve been through something.
I do think the show did something really bold with both its source material and the two seasons that came before it. Where Interview is intimate and thoughtful, Lestat is brash and violent and hostile; while I can only imagine the arguments that must have happened at AMC over the decision to essentially rename a popular TV series mid-run, the name also helps set the expectation that this is something new. I admired how brave it was with what it was doing, even if I frequently didn’t exactly like it. The next season will change names again, and while I don’t know that the world needs another adaptation of what I personally find to be the beginning of the least interesting things Rice’s books do, I do think the show has proved it’s not precious about either its source material or itself. This means it could do practically anything, and hopefully the things it does change The Queen of the Damned for the better.
Rice was famously precious about her characters, and though she and her son Christopher have producing credits on the show, Anne Rice passed away while it was early in development. I think it’s a good thing that more people can play in the world she created, even if the show doesn’t always match what’s in my head.
