I Believe "The Failures" Framing Device was Added After the Season was Filmed
I don't have proof of this, someone on the writing team could disprove this, I am saying what I saw in the season:
The framing device of "The Failures" was probably written in late 2025 after initial negative feedback on the season from producers or the network, who did not understand what was happening in the show and demanded a fix. It required limited reshoots to incorporate, allowed the editors to heavily recut previously written sequences to incorporate it, cut down on elements they thought weren't working, and increase the elements they thought were working.
This is value-neutral on whether or not you liked the season or the voiceover. You'll probably pick up on my feelings on both along the way.
(I tried to spoiler tag this correctly, but fyi, this spoils E7)
Point One: So much stock footage.
The overwhelming majority of the voiceover in The Vampire Lestat is played over stock footage, clips from prior seasons, or b-roll. This is not the way a voiceover is traditionally written into a script; for a good example of a traditional voiceover, see the first two seasons of Interview with the Vampire. The voiceover transitions us between scenes or is given actual sequences, longer shots, directly related to what we are hearing, to play over.
"He was in love with my city." We see them in New Orleans. "Lestat had disappeared," and we see the start of a scene of him trying to apologize. This isn't random footage, this is filmed intentionally.
There is an absurd amount of stock footage and season one and two footage being played over voiceover in this season. Several voiceover sequences include no footage we have a reason to think was specifically for this season at all.
Look at the lead in to the strip club scene in episode two: greenscreen + stock footage (likely filmed for the original scene transition), stock footage, b-roll insert:
The opening of episode four: stock footage, b-roll, footage from a prior episode that is unrelated to this sequence:
Is using stock footage or b-roll or reusing footage from prior episodes inherently bad or inherently a sign that the voiceover was added later? I'm not saying that, and don't accuse me of saying that. Stock footage is a normal tool, you film b-roll to use it.
But when a giant proportion of the voiceover is only over sequences like this, I wonder if the editors are having to create visuals for something that wasn't planned when the show was filmed, especially because:
Point Two: The transitions in and out of the flashbacks are filmed as if there wasn't originally a voiceover there.
Here is an extremely common piece of film grammar for a flashback with no voiceover, demonstrated in season one: a character goes to sleep, crossfade into a flashback, wakes up. We don't need a voiceover here because the language is easy to understand. He's falling asleep? People dream about the past sometimes. He's waking up? He was dreaming about the past and is now awake. They're both common transitions between flashbacks and a frame story.
You actually only need one of the two: the transition out in this example is just an additional moment for the Armand reveal to sink in. Especially if it's a natural edit break, (or, let's say, the beginning of an episode?) you only need one device to justify a flashback.
So it's really interesting that The Vampire Lestat, which has a voiceover as a conceit throughout, uses so many other traditional flashback transitions for scenes from Lestat's POV, almost as though the writers needed to justify why we are seeing the flashbacks in a version of the script that didn't have a voiceover framing device for Lestat.
Why does he need to tell us he's going into a flashback in a voiceover (over stock footage) if we're going to see him wake up from having remembered this in a dream afterwards?
Why do we have multiple framing devices to allow him to give us voiceover within the tour framing device? Why is he telling us that he told someone else a story as a pretext to tell it?
There is nothing wrong with using multiple ways to get in and out of flashbacks- but this season uses a lot. In my example from season one, there is a simple reason we can't use the main one we've been using: Daniel is not a POV character, so to see inside of his POV, we need a different device.
All of these flashbacks are meant to be Lestat. If you think about what he is telling us on The Failures, he... needs to explain his mom and then he woke up? He talked to Daniel about Nicki and then told the listener, about Nicki in a fragmented way at that time? He's telling us about how he was attacked by Akasha, but really needed to get back to how his band was bad, and then remembered he needed to tell us the rest of that story when he was telling it to the band? Huh?
To be honest: there isn't really a flashback I can identify where the voiceover is required at all.
Point Three: Style and substance.
If the voiceover was always intended, you would expect it to serve a function within the show, give us information we can't get anywhere else, motivate editing choices, etc. Here is a challenge: watch any sequence with significant voiceover and think about the information you got from it. Then, within the next ten minutes of the same episode, see if there is anything the voiceover told you that they didn't almost immediately tell you again with either visuals or dialogue giving you identical information.
Almost all of the voiceover could be removed and leave the audience with the exact same amount of understanding or confusion as they would have with it.
Example from episode four:
The Voiceover: "It can grind you down or deliver you home. And which would it be for our Marginal Mystery Tour back in the bosom of the nifty 50 United States? Digitally, there was some optimism, as somewhere between the P Diddler and Chipotle's new Adobo Ranch sauce, The Vampire Lestat found itself momentarily trending. Cell phone footage of yours truly went viral as both irrefutable proof of the cloud gift and deepfake Antichrist."
In the framing device, Lestat is told by Christine that a major investor wants to talk to him. In the next scene where the band's popularity is relevant, twenty minutes later, the investor says to Lestat:
Andrew: "I didn't know you were alive three days ago. I watched the video. Did a deep dive on the band, the Beautiful Unwell, flew here to Albany, playing "Long Face,". "Plastic Fiends," and "Loneliness" in a loop on my Beats. Saw the show. It's impossible. Saw the fans waiting outside the hotel. Impossible. I saw the protesters outside the hotel. Impossible."
Seems like we'd have been able to figure out the band went viral from a levitation video that seems impossible.
If it's not giving us a lot of new information, then it could be mostly a stylistic choice: It is a stylistic choice. It's one they likely added afterwards. Deciding on the season was chaotic, and making it more stylistically chaotic by including the voiceover and re-edit made it easier to fix the problem they were trying to fix.
It's especially obvious because the episode that feels the most like the prior seasons, episode six, is the one with the least voiceover. Probably because we are watching something pretty similar to what they thought the episode was when they filmed it.
And I just got to put this out there: re-cutting your project to stylize it to make room for a voiceover you need to include because no one understands the narrative as you filmed it with the footage you have was a literal running joke among my cohort in film school.
It doesn't say anything about how the original scripts looked. I used to put a lot of badly color-balanced footage in black-and-white as a "stylistic choice" in high school, too.
Point Four: The voiceover ruins plot points that were meant to be shocking.
Why do you behead a character at the end of an episode? So the audience is shocked and has to wait until next week to see what the outcome of that character being beheaded is.
That really doesn't work if that character is doing an omniscient voiceover we know is in the future.
"Do you think we're really meant to think they're dead?" No, I don't think the users of Tumblr.com the website are meant to think he's dead; I think a random person who doesn't use Tumblr is supposed to argue with their spouse after the episode ends about whether or not he's dead. That's why you do things like this!
You don't fakeout kill a character we know from earlier this same episode isn't dead, because it doesn't mean anything.
This one is more of a broad swing of a theory and assumes they did some fairly significant re-edits to move reveals around, but I also don't think we're supposed to know that Gabriella is his mom by the end of episode one, because they even lampshade how this isn't a good reveal.
If this is true, I don't know when we would have learned about who Gabriella is. I assume it would have been in episode two, because we have to know she's his mother from the flashbacks.
A plausible idea is that the actual kiss there was either from a re-shoot or filmed as an option they could use or not use: after this makeout scene, there is a lot of dialogue in the next episode which could have been planned as a "are they?? are they not??" about the nature of their relationship.
Given this conversation in episode two, it still wouldn't have been ambiguous at all, so it would have been a bad writing choice to assume the audience had any doubt here. Then again, we're talking about fucking Gabriella on The Vampire Lestat, so I'm not assuming a choice being really stupid rules it out as something they were trying to do.
They spent so much of this season on the shocking reveal that Lestat is fucking his mom; it's information we get in the form of a reveal like four times, and then the voiceover adds even more.
Guys... I think there might be incest in this show? Not sure.
It's such a huge element that keeps giving us the same information at the same level of detail, without a twist, without a recontextualization, that I have to entertain the possibility that they decided to make it... more significant later in the process? That's a terrible thought.
Point Five: The way book references are used is really weird.
This adaptation is not made for people with an encyclopedic knowledge of The Vampire Chronicles. As one of those people, I feel comfortable saying this, but also because that's not a market you can sell a show to, because it's too small. Seasons one and two mostly knew that, the Armand reveal being the big exception. The scenes we are watching that aren't voiceover mostly know that.
The way the show deploys book references in the voiceover is really weird.
We know there was a writer's assistant (if you see this: congrats, holy shit, that's a hell of a break, genuinely; also, if I am 100% wrong here and you know, that's hilarious) checking the books for information. I'm not naming them because people are being rude to them about the season (don't do that), but they mentioned this being something they did:
That's a real detail the show gets right: in episode six, at least a lot of the fake names we see are real aliases from the books! It stands out to me, then, that one of the biggest total book-niche fun fact blunders is in the voiceover:
"Picture my five dead siblings, Aristide, Marie, Jules, unbaptized, and Faustin, garden gnomes guarding the undulating domestic bliss of our great hall."
People have mentioned this a lot already, but if you don't know, from Blackwood Farm, Lestat's brother's initials are L-E-S-T-A-T:
"The name [Lestat is] compounded of the first letter of each of my six older brothers’ names."
That isn't proof of anything; it's just interesting to me. It's almost like the voiceover was written after the writers' room was dismissed, when there wasn't someone whose job it was to look up these things anymore. Huh.
It's also very strange to me what level the voiceover thinks you are supposed to be familiar with the books, in comparison to how much they are changing from them.
The show starts with a voiceover that assumes you are familiar with the plot of The Queen of the Damned.
"And I am not saying that the attempted extinction of the Y chromosome across the continents was all my fault."
And in one of the two scenes actually shot in the framing device, we get a shot that assumes you've read The Tale of the Body Thief?
These aren't Easter Eggs- well, they're not good Easter Eggs. Eh, I'll give you the Raglan one if you argue with me.
These are real pieces of information that it's extremely odd to expect some of the audience to know nothing whatsoever about, and others to understand completely. Usually, an adaptation is a different experience if you know the source material or don't, but not on the level of making or not making sense. It's kind of like they want you, when you Google what is happening, to find out the plots of these books via something like The Vampire Chronicles Wiki.
What these references all do is serve an extremely specific function: telling a general audience, if they Google it, that a plot is coming.
I wonder why they felt the need to add a voiceover to clarify that.
Point Six: Episode Seven, The Failures.
I suspected a lot of what I said above from episode one on, and was basically certain from the flashbacks in episode two. I didn't know why they did this exactly, but it explained a lot of what felt odd about the editing.
I figured it was probably a logic issue: something about the show was too vague, and people didn't understand what was happening, so they added the voiceover. It would make sense since a lot of it felt vague even with the voiceover. Maybe the logic issue was caused by something else: maybe something experimental they tried in the script, like more of the "long table," really didn't come across at all on screen; maybe a story element looked or just came across really bad, and they had to cut down on the amount it was shown and fill in the gaps; maybe a block of filming got cut or rushed and they didn't get enough footage.
I don't think I guessed that the logic issue of the season was going to be that the last episode just randomly ends mid-scene with no resolution of any storyline whatsover?
I would love to know what on earth was originally scripted to be the end of season three. Did they write the ending from the book and find out late in the game they couldn't afford to film it? Did they film it, and something was horribly wrong with it? Did they write an eighth episode, only get greenlit for seven, and not rearrange the season at all?
I mean, I can't imagine someone was like, "yep, that's a good way to end a season of television. The people will love that!" Genuinely. For real. I don't think someone said that!
People who know the truth can prove me wrong: send me the teleplays and I'll believe you. Otherwise:
The Vampire Lestat's framing device The Failures, and potentially other significant elements of the season, are a result of significant rework because the season as originally intended was not deemed acceptable to air, possibly because they didn't actually film the originally intended conclusion.
-and if I'm right, I want Mark Johnson to give me a two-year option on the rights to Blackwood Farm for $1 as payment for my suffering.
Not arguing the points in case(!), just adding on that Rolin said so himself (though it might indeed be debatable at which point they made this decision given what you laid out here).
The Vampire Lestat's big change, explained.
Rolin Jones: A lot of it was because of our first take when we were first writing the beginning of it. We made an experiment, and we wanted to say, "What if we don't do it with a voiceover?" And I think, pretty early on, we found out we were having a hard time. We were doing extra work to try to get to the stuff that was inside.
One night, I just went home and started rereading the book again, and I fell in love again with Lestat's voice. I was like, "Okay, well, he's a different person. He sounds very different. He would have a different way of attacking it." But how do we do it? I didn't want him to write another novel; that didn't seem like it fit the Lestat that we had built.
While coming up with this art project and thinking about where he was, which I think was a particularly lonely place, this idea of [the Samuel Beckett play] Krapp's Last Tape really landed for all of us. We were like, "Okay, let's put him with a microphone and let him go ahead and see what comes out." That became a really easy way to shape how information was delivered and how to shape an arc that seems like it's all artifice at the beginning, and then just starts cracking down.
We always had the comfort of going back to Lestat in this particular moment with his microphone and his reel-to-reel, and for all the playwrights in the room, that gave us a sense of comfort.
No, there was always voiceover while they were filming. It might have been added late in the writing process. We know becasue Sam said in an interview the "I bet, I bet" part of the lawyer scene was never supposed to be heard and was supposed to a voiceover over the top. Link.
