Get Hot and Bothered With Interview With the Vampire
We get it: There’s an overwhelming number of television shows right now. The streaming landscape is an impractical maze, and the good stuff easily gets lost in the shuffle. But most of us can still find one show that cuts through the noise. We call this “appointment viewing” — or the time you carve out in your busy schedule to watch the show you’ll want to unpack the next day with your friends while it’s still on your mind. Tune in here each month to read what writer Michel Ghanem, a.k.a. @tvscholar, deems worthy of a group-chat deep dive.
So far this year, we’ve covered prestige-TV hits like Shōgun and True Detective, and we moved into lighter fare to have some fun with The Girls on the Bus and Big Mood. This month, we recommend catching up on AMC’s Interview With the Vampire, one of the best dramas currently airing on TV, which returns with another excellent season on May 12.
What’s this horny vampire show I keep hearing about?
Interview With the Vampire is a television gothic-horror adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, which picks up the queer tones of the book that were mostly left out of the 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The first season follows Louis (Jacob Anderson), a 145-year-old vampire who recounts his life’s story to Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), a human journalist at the end of his career who gets the unique opportunity to hear Louis’s unvarnished story. The show is told through flashbacks, beginning with Louis’s “birth” as a vampire by his “maker” Lestat (Sam Reid) back in the 1910s. Eventually, they both care for Claudia (Bailey Bass), a 14-year-old girl who joins their unconventional vampire family.
The first season — an exhilaratingly bloody, romantic, and lyrical tale told through knockout performances — aired to critical acclaim and various award nods but still managed to fly under the radar. Critics were given six season-two episodes (there are eight in total), and I can say with confidence that this sexy vampire show is as bold and propulsive as ever, despite moving to a different setting and shooting location. In the premiere episode, we find Claudia (who has been recast with Delainey Hayles) dragging Louis around Eastern Europe during World War II in search of more of their kind after Lestat’s assumed death. Finally settling in Paris after their wandering, Louis and Claudia meet a coven of vampires and theatrical troupe led by Armand (Assad Zaman), Louis’s mysterious partner in the present-day timeline whom we finally get to know properly throughout the season.
Where can I watch it?
The vampires return to the small screen on May 12, with single episodes airing every following Sunday. If you’re not caught up, the first season that originally aired in 2022 is a delicious binge on AMC+. Since gaining the rights to various sets of Anne Rice fantasy-novel series, AMC has made a concerted programming push to build out the “Immortal Universe,” which includes Mayfair Witches, about a neurosurgeon learning about how she inherited her witch powers, and a third series in development. AMC has teased future crossover episodes between the series, which take place in a shared universe.
Interview With the Vampire is a major shift in strategy for AMC, a network that spent the last decade putting most of its development power behind half a dozen The Walking Dead spinoffs that didn’t always recapture the magic of the early days of the zombie series. Interview, created by Rolin Jones (who produced Friday Night Lights and Weeds), is somewhere between this newer supernatural iteration of the network and its older programming slate that contained more slow-burn, character-driven series like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire.
So, is it anything like True Blood?
While the Louisiana-based True Blood leaned on supernatural clichés and sex appeal to win over an audience on HBO, Interview With the Vampire is more interested in intimacy and existential explorations and the complexities of navigating superhuman relationships. The show’s characters are constantly pondering philosophical questions about themselves and each other. In this way, it’s less overtly campy than Alan Ball’s True Blood — but both shows are delightfully and unapologetically queer.
Some episodes in Interview With the Vampire’s second season dial down the blood and gore in favor of thoughtful character development. Don’t expect the show to leave behind its roots as a gothic horror, but the mid-season pace will remind viewers that this is primarily a character-focused drama. We get yet another showcase of powerful emotional range from Anderson as Louis while he processes the loss of one lover to be open to the next. And despite having big shoes to fill, Delainey Hayles’s debut as Claudia is just as masterful, peeling back the layers beyond Claudia’s youthful ferocity to find her agency as a young vampire — in Paris, no less.
The show probably has more in common with Fellow Travelers and Foundation than True Blood or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, telling an intricate multi-decade story of survival, self-discovery, and love — all through the lens of sometimes unreliable narrators riddled with biases. You won’t want to miss the steamy cinematic sex scenes, either! They’re less prevalent in the second season, and not so raunchy that you can’t watch these new episodes with your mom, but you should know that this show has inspired GIF sets across the internet of vampires levitating mid-coitus. Often, just the act of penetrating a neck is framed in a sensual way. Here’s hoping Interview With the Vampire, which is powerfully performed and lavishly produced, catches on culturally for some well-deserved Emmy nominations this time around.