The way this season is so blatantly uninterested in actually adapting the book it's literally named after... Look, I don't think I'm a book purist, I really loved s1/s2 (despite some gripes I had even then) but this is just egregious. The way this season glossed over everything fans were expecting to see in favour of....what, exactly? More meaningless rockstar shenanigans that no one asked for?
I can't believe Lestat's fuckass lyrics include a line about him having been Lelio, not Harlequin like Armand portrayed him to be but we don't even get to see him actually on stage in his own recollection! So for all we know Armand's version of events is the truth because Lestat never bothers to even refute his claim.
I'm just so confused how Rolin Jones has not died of embarrassment yet, constantly dragging around that book for years (even while he was working on IWTV???) and then delivering a season where practically none of it made it into the show.
It's like they just included those Auvergne scenes because they knew they had to or fans would truly riot. Those scenes in particular (from episode 2) feel especially bad to me. I get the budget limitations they had and why so many of these scenes centre around that big dining table, I still think they could have delivered a better final product.
Frankly, it feels like they just used their first draft, those scenes really lack a lot of the finesse I came to associate with this show's writing (it has been lacking otherwise as well this season, of course, but those scenes just seem particularly bad to me).
I hate how over the top evil Lestat's family is, his father telling his brothers to break his leg for saying the word "cabbage", Lestat stabbing one of them in the side and no one even blinks etc. The wigs are of course atrociously bad as well and don't help at all (I still cringe remembering how his brother's wig visibly slipped when Gabriella attacked him).
I do not understand why Gabriella is such a flat character and why Jennifer Ehle (who I know is a great actress!) plays her the way she does. It's everything, the accent, the line delivery, even the way she emotes. Just insane choices all around tbh.
There is nothing of substance there, just a quick rattling off of important backstory beats, like the monastery and the theatre troupe and even the wolves are just another item on the list to be checked off. And I get that these flashbacks are supposed to be more about Gabriella and her relationship with Lestat and how it influences him rather than just him retelling important life events and that's why there is less focus on those parts where she is not present but I just do not think that was a good choice at all.
Especially the wolfkiller sequence. They must have known how important that scene is for fans and how much everyone has been looking forward to it and what they delivered was insultingly bad. And I get budgetary constraints, I *still* think they could have done better. Even without showing more of the wolves. At the very least they shouldn't have shot the scene on a nice, sunny spring afternoon. Setting it during winter would have already helped with the atmosphere of it all, or maybe even have it set at night if adding fake snow would have been too much. Then the wolves could have been a little more hidden as well and they could have worked more with shadows or the grass rustling or noises coming from far off. Have more close-ups of Lestat's face and his visible anxiety and distress. Maybe even have the camera take up the POV of the wolf attacking Lestat and convey the fight of it that way. And of course, make the death of his dog(s) actually matter, talk about how Lestat slept with them in his own bed and how he had raised them himself. I understand that him having to kill his horse on screen would have been hard to shoot but at least have him talk about it off-screen. I think in general this could have been a great way to include more book lines in his narration of events, which could have created tension without even having a lot of stuff going on visually.
Then I'm also a little pissed that we did get parts of the book scene where Gabrielle visits Lestat in the aftermath of the wolves but it's insane how much of her speech got cut out from the show and instead the only thing we're really focusing on is her dream of getting a train run on her. Okay then.
Look, I know that is part of what she says in the book as well and even when I was reading it in the book I thought it at the very least showed a distinct lack of boundaries between them. And I don't even think portraying the incest as more abusive is necessarily a bad choice, considering how the portrayal might affect real victims of incest. I just do not think flattening Gabriell(e/a) down to a hyperfeminine nymphomaniac dommy mummy is a great choice. And even if there is some grand reveal at the end of the season that shows her to be a more multifaceted character than what we've been seeing so far I still do not think that having almost a whole season where the one major female character is reduced to this is a good idea.
I also hate how Nicki wasn't there in Auvergne and didn't give Lestat his red cloak, but that is a more minor complaint.
Also, it's insane to me how Lestat's family come across as caricatures when Louis' family in s1 was portrayed with so much care and they felt like real people with their own interiority. Even Florence, who was not a very loveable character, still felt like a real person to me. Meanwhile not even Gabriella, who you can definitely consider the second lead with how much screentime she's been hogging, feels like anything but an incredibly juvenile and sexist portrayal of a character that was afforded so much more dignity in the books, despite Anne Rice's vocal dislike of her.
In general, the flashbacks this season have been such a massive downgrade from what we've got in the past seasons. They used to take single lines from the book and make whole scenes out of them, they expanded so much on scenes that Anne Rice only ever glossed over. And now for TVL, the book that had never been adapted before, they're taking the opposite approach and I'm just left wondering, WHY?
