One of the best shows on TV, AMC’s Interview With the Vampire, is back with a vengeance and a big difference. In its third installment, which premiered Sunday, the show has literally changed its tune as it heavily incorporates music to underscore Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), who has become a vampire rock star in our modern era, telling his side of the story that consumed the previous seasons. Now, armed with a new point of view and tone, the show has never been hotter. The Vampire Lestat—the official rebranded name of this season—has received noticeably more promotion than the previous iteration of the show, including 20 original songs, splashier press and interviews, and even its own concert to kick off the season premiere. But this glow-up has received mixed responses from fans, who feel bittersweet: happy that their favorite show is finally receiving the attention it deserves, but resentful that this attention has come after so many changes. As a longtime devotee of AMC’s fanged fantasia, I can relate to these emotions. However, although the criticisms rings true, fans’ frustration has also begun to bubble over into unjustified accusations, overshadowing the nuance that this series and this conversation deserve.
The first two seasons of Interview With the Vampire, AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved Gothic vampire novel series, followed Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson). More accurately, it listened to Louis as he recounted his life’s story in an interview with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian), a cynical investigative journalist looking to write his final book. Louis spent the first two seasons telling Daniel about his toxic relationship with two vampires: Lestat, the former Frenchman who turned Louis into a vampire and who was as intemperate and manipulative as he was alluring and affirming, and Armand (Assad Zaman), who was found to be much steadier, if not more manipulative in his cowardice. This resulted in the in-world book Interview With the Vampire, which earned Daniel two Pulitzers and international acclaim. Now, in the third season, Lestat, currently leading a rock career as the lead singer of the band the Vampire Lestat, is the one sitting down with the journalist for a documentary in which he seeks to correct Louis’ record. As a result, Season 3—a musical acid-trip depiction of a vampire, racked by guilt, losing his grip on reality while gaining his grip on a guitar neck—relegates Louis to, if not the back seat, at least the passenger side.
But while this was always meant to be the trajectory of the show, in following the source material, this shake-up unfortunately coincides with clear signs that AMC is choosing now to finally pay attention to its own series. That the show has received an obviously higher promotional budget only after Louis’ hands were taken off the wheel has upset many fans who feel that the channel might be losing a handle on how to handle this show. On paper, it looks a bit like a Black protagonist being shafted so that a white narrator can take over with aplomb. This sits at odds with how Interview With the Vampire, as a show, has handled race. In Rice’s world, Louis was a plantation owner whose story with Lestat starts in the late 1700s; here, though, Louis is a Black Creole owner of a brothel whose story starts in the early 1900s, a time when he is pointedly prohibited from entrepreneurism by interpersonal and structural racism. Although some Rice die-hards were, unsurprisingly, upset by the casting of Anderson in this updated role, it didn’t stop the producers from building an increasingly diverse cast over the show’s three seasons. Take Claudia, who is white in the source text but portrayed by two Black actresses on-screen (Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles), or Armand, who is Ukrainian in the novels but played by Zaman, who is Bengali-British.
The show’s cast and excellent writing in its first two seasons earned it a strong fandom, especially from nonwhite audiences who appreciated the care shown to the series’ diverse characters. It was a sore point, however, that promotion for the show—which was always paltry at best—rarely touched on how impressive its casting is, and how Louis’ Blackness made for a much richer text that created even more layers of complexity between him and Lestat. It didn’t help that many viewers felt AMC wasn’t doing enough to try to net Anderson’s phenomenal performance in the first two seasons a major award nomination. Black fans in particular have vocally championed the show, taking on much of the responsibility of marketing the series and its stars themselves in the absence of a strong push from the studio. Culture critics like Bobbi Miller and Frankey Smith have spent plenty of time on social media discussing and praising the show; Miller even co-hosts a rewatch podcast for the series.
With this context in mind, it’s understandable why many fans would feel some stinging whiplash at seeing the show finally get a larger budget after a white narrator takes over. In an interview with Variety, AMC Global Media’s chief marketing officer, Kim Granito, said that giving the show its own title and a “moment to relaunch the series felt like the right thing to do. … If people potentially found Seasons 1 or 2, and it wasn’t for them, this is an entirely new angle.” But, as some fans pointed out online, what about the people who those seasons were for? To make matters even more complicated, Lestat’s whole shtick this season, by design, is discrediting Louis’ version of events recounted in the first two seasons. Though fans may love Lestat as a complex character, many are even more protective of Louis, whom they’ve spent the past four years following on their TV screens, and whom they feel is being given short shrift or disrespected now that his accounts are being dismissed.
This pretty much says what we thought—Season 3 has a BIGGER marketing budget than Season 2. And that Black fans are upset. I could have written this lol
What is AMC’s response? 👀👀
