BlueBell

Let's start things off with a few disclosures: I have never taken a journalism class. I have a loose grasp on grammar that gets looser when I like the vibes of a run-on sentence and tighter when I see clear copyediting errors from international news conglomerates. I have no background in criticism other than watching Ratatouille.

With that out of the way, I can begin with a question, which is as follows: When did sincere, serious engagement with media get steamrolled in favor of TikTok-speak-laden, millennial irony masquerading as Gen Z nihilism, poorly copyedited and under-researched recaps that read like an over-drafted Twitter thread? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for utilizing new slang and turns of phrase in journalistic writing. It's 2026! You're writing about a TV show, not submitting a paper to an academic journal. I'm also not saying that reviews need to be serious analysis, necessarily. I realize that sounds contradictory. I don't think it is. You could write a 5,000 word masterfully-composed thinkpiece on one singular scene or a bullet-point list of plot and character beats – my issue is not with the type or the format of content. The issue here is that many of the pieces I have read don't respect the art of what the authors are engaging with enough to meet it on the level it is trying to speak to them on.

Maybe I'm judging too harshly, and the authors of such pieces are simply adopting the sort of voice that makes screenshots from their articles go viral. It's not a bad strategy if all you care about is hits, and I don't want to put blame for that on the authors. I'm sure the editors and the higher-ups are at fault for much of the tone of this questionable content. But I think we should take a step back and question how we talk about a show that is handling extremely heavy topics that are deeply personal to many viewers in an unflinching, skilled, carefully-crafted way, and ask ourselves whether this is really what we want to be flippant about, and whether there is a point where flippancy crosses the line from a cheeky audience-relational tone to genuine (if unintended) disrespect towards the creative team who made the show what it is.

Case in point: calling Lestat a goo-goo eyed simp. I like Lestat as a character, obviously, but this is such a mind-boggling tone deaf description of him in this scene that it makes me physically angry. Let’s step back and analyze what’s happening in this scene, shall we?

Lestat and Gabriella, who are son and mother and maker and fledgling, are traveling together after leaving Paris in the flashback

In the present day, Gabriella has left. She does not answer her phone or most text messages that Lestat sends her. This sends Lestat into a spiral, shown both by the excellent score from Daniel Hart and the chaotic editing of the party scene, with quick-fire flashbacks and the appearance of the muses.

In the beach scene flashback, Gabriella is telling Lestat that she wants to be pure evil, and Lestat is reluctantly going along with her future desires because he wants to be with her.

That’s the best I can do for a bare-bones analysis of the character dynamics and relevant plot points here. You may notice one very glaring omission. That is the revelation of the “start” of their incestuous sexual relationship as vampires. It informs so much of the later beach scene flashback, and it is incredibly harrowing to watch.

In the scene, we see Lestat confront Gabriella as she is in the middle of sex with a priest. He tells her he could hear her through the walls. It’s immediately obvious that the scene in the previous episode, where Gabriella leaves in the middle of Lestat’s interview — just when he’s getting into the story of Nicki, a clearly painful and vulnerable moment — to have extremely loud sex with Jarda, Lestat’s body double (whom she asks to put on the Lestat wig before meeting her in the bathroom) is a parallel. At the time, we understood this as a response to Lestat setting the boundary of not having sex with Gabriella. This episode, it's clear that this it also must have triggered the memory we're seeing play out now.

Gabriella kills the man, and Lestat gets more or less to the point: when Gabriella tended his wounds (and sexually assaulted him) back when they were both human, they were mother and son. Sam Reid's powerhouse performance makes it obvious that this is something Lestat has been struggling with for some time. Lestat knows that it was wrong then, and, crucially, he knows it is wrong now. Gabriella may feel untethered from the role of wife, mother, and woman by vampirism, but Lestat is unable to sever his relationship from her as his mother, a relationship already severely muddied by the sexual abuse we both saw on-screen and hear later in this episode when Lestat sings "By candlelight/You used to teach me how to kiss," a line seemingly about Gabriella and their shared history. Vampirism is not going to undo the years of sexual abuse he had to go through with his mother, who he describes as cold and emotionally witholding, or unentangle what must be a deeply confusing relationship to sex, being sexually desired, emotional closeness, love, and parent-child relationships. It is a deeply, deeply fucked-up relationship. Gabriella's answer to Lestat trying to confront her about the incest is one word: "And?"

And then follows a scene that, for me, was more difficult to watch than Magnus' rape of Lestat. Gabriella whispers "I love you." We watch Lestat's face, tightly framed by the shot and by shadow, as he struggles against tears and loses. Gabriella repeats it, and Lestat, looking lost and extremely distraught, kisses her. The camera focuses on his face in the following two shots of them having sex. His expression is pained. We hear the sound of waves crashing on the shore, foreshadowing the scene on the beach. This is the price of Gabriella's love. This is what he has to do to keep her with him. And, in the scene just before she leaves him, we see that even this is not enough.

The showrunner, Rolin Jones, was quoted as saying that they aren't portraying the incestuous relationship just to portray it or for shock value (sorry for the clumsy paraphrase, Rolin). This relationship, and this abuse, is fundamental for understanding why Lestat is the way he is in the present moment, why he does the things he does, why he acts the way he acts, and why he makes the choices he makes. The show is handling an extremely difficult topic with unflinching understanding of the impact this sort of abuse has on survivors, and I think it should be lauded for not trying to shy away from or soften what happens between Gabriella and Lestat. They're showing it as Lestat remembered and experienced it. They aren't letting us look away from the monstrosity of it all. Are you uncomfortable? Good. You're supposed to be.

With all of that in mind, I want to return to the "goo-goo eyed simp" description of Lestat. My issue with this is much larger than any read of his character. Yes, I know this is a show about vampires, and yes, Lestat is a larger-than-life hurricane full of modern slang, quips about current trends, and pronunciations of words that I'm pretty sure have never been spoken before. I wouldn't be surprised if he calls himself a goo-goo eyed simp at some point. That's not what pisses me off. What pisses me off is the complete and utter refusal to meet the show where it stands.

To me, characterizing Lestat in this scene as a goo-goo eyed simp who will "go along with whatever mommy wants, as long as they're together" and describing Gabriella's reaction to his drawing of a wedding ring in his blood around her finger as giving her, "the ickiest vamp alive! [...] the ick" isn't just a two-for-one example of slang-based humor not landing – it's dismissive of the entire character arc of the episode in a way that feels genuinely disrespectful to everyone involved. It's like the reviewer/recapper equivalent of scrolling through reels while your friend tries to tell you a story, and only half-heartedly chiming in to make fun of them for mispronouncing a word or ask a question about a minor detail that has very little to do with what the story means to them. It reads as though the author doesn't care enough to pay attention to the show to keep track of what's actually going on (Gabriella wants to be free from everything and everyone! She wants to lean fully into the evil side of vampirism! She knows Lestat's heart isn't in it and that he will always be a reminder of her mortal past and of her ties to the world! That's why she leaves! Not because she gets the fucking ick! This is a fundamental part of her character!!).

You can have different opinions on this show and what it is trying to accomplish than I do. But even most of the bad-faith criticisms I've seen about TVL are preferable to this shallow, dismissive style of review. They, at least, engage with the show from the view that it is trying to say something.

This form of summary – reducing incredibly complex relationships and dynamics down to things like "getting the ick" and "simping" – is a blatant refusal to engage with the show at all. And while I can acknowledge that comedy has its place in critique, you need to actually understand what you're writing about to be funny about it. The best jokes are funny because they're true. The worst ones, in my opinion, are written like they're intended to be quote tweeted. What you lose when you refuse the hand the creative team behind this show holds out to you is both the opportunity to be emotionally moved by a story and the respect of your audience.