so i need to be insufferable about The Vampire Lestat for a minute and i need everyone to understand going in that i’m the crank here, not the consensus
context: i’ve seen one episode. the reviews are basically a wall of raves, RT’s sitting up near 100, every critic i respect is doing a victory lap. and i’m sitting here going. is it though
the setup, because the whole season hangs on it. they retitled the show. it’s not Interview with the Vampire season three, it’s The Vampire Lestat, adapting the second Rice book, and the premise is that Lestat read the bestseller built out of Louis’s testimony, decided he’d been slandered, and is now correcting the record by. starting a band. going on tour. Daniel’s filming a rockumentary about it. the whole thing is pitched as unreliable narrator , the Lestat you knew was Louis’s version, “both villainized and idealized” (that’s the Ebert review), and now you finally meet the real guy.
and like. that’s a clever trick on paper. it’s also where i get off the train.
seasons one and two worked because they were Louis’s story. not incidentally his. structurally his. they race-bent him, made him a Black man in Jim Crow New Orleans, and suddenly the whole vampire-as-outsider thing that’s kind of limp and aristocratic in the novels had actual stakes. the metaphor meant something because of whose mouth the story came out of. that was the best idea the adaptation ever had and it wasn’t subtle about it being the point.
season three’s entire foundation is: actually that version was the distorted one. the show’s own promo copy calls Louis’s book a “trashy best-seller.” the animating move of the season is handing the microphone to the white guy who feels he was done dirty, so he can do it over. IndieWire — a positive review! — calls the season flat out “a rewrite on what came before” and “a revision of the heated emotions therein.”
i’m not saying anybody intended anything. i can’t see into a writers’ room and i’m not going to pretend to. but you can talk about what a thing does without claiming to know why, and what this does is spend two seasons making a Black character’s interiority the wall everything else leans on, and then build the third season on the idea that his account needs fixing by the man who turned him and loved him and wrecked him. Ebert’s review notes Louis literally gets shunted into a plotline called Side B. MovieWeb and Inverse both circle the same wound from the comfortable side of it — Louis “is not having any fun,” the season “can’t reconcile the pain and trauma of its B-plot with the debauchery of its A-plot.” they file that as a tone note. i’d file it as: the trauma got quarantined into the B-plot, and it’s the same trauma that was racialized for two seasons, while the A-plot is a white rockstar throwing the most fun nervous breakdown of all time. yes it’s faithful to the book. the novel really does pass the mic to Lestat in volume two. “faithful to the structure” and “drains the thing that made this worth adapting” are allowed to both be true. that’s just what adaptation is — every version is somebody choosing what to put in front, and the choice to put Lestat’s grievance in front, as a correction of Louis, is itself a statement no matter who meant what.
separate complaint, equally heretical. the rockumentary format is a downgrade wearing a glow-up.
because here’s the thing about the rave reviews — read them cold and they’re describing a coherence problem in an admiring voice. the MovieWeb critic LIKED it, read the novel to prep, and still says the episodes are “in such a hurry to get to the next idea, the next monologue, the next song, the next bit, that they’re in danger of shaking apart.” that it “bounces from one thing to the next so manically that it’s hard for a coherent narrative to build.” IndieWire cops to the premiere being gonzo and manic before it allegedly finds its feet. Ebert admits the good stuff doesn’t show up till episode four. read that back to yourself. the season is good once it stops doing the thing it renamed itself after.
seasons one and two were quiet and patient and a little airless on purpose. two people in a room, a relationship rotting in slow motion across decades, the interview frame holding everything in this tight claustrophobic grip. that was the craft. the mock-rockumentary throws all of it out for tempo and gags — campy voiceover, a music video standing in where a plot beat should be, everyone talking over everyone. some people are high on the chaos. i think it’s a show that got scared of its own stillness and turned the volume up to hide it. and the Spinal Tap comparison everybody keeps making? Spinal Tap is a comedy ABOUT how hollow rock-god posturing is. adopt its form and you’ve adopted a register that physically cannot do interiority, which is the one thing the first two seasons were made of.
so then why the perfect scores. genuinely my best guesses, no grand theory: one, two great seasons bought an enormous amount of goodwill and goodwill pays for a lot of “trust the swing.” two, “bold reinvention!!” is just a better, more fun piece to write than “the careful show got loud.” and three, Sam Reid is apparently incandescent in this, even the skeptics say so, and when one actor is having the time of his immortal life the review grades the performance and quietly rounds the rest up. not a scam. just what a star turn does to the gravity in the room.
to be clear i’m not calling it unwatchable, i’m going to finish it obviously, Reid sounds like a force, Anderson is the best thing in any frame he’s ever in, and a sloppy season of this show still laps most of what’s on TV. but “sloppy season of a great show” is a real and honorable category and i think the reflexive 100s are mashing a genuine step down — in formal control AND in the show’s relationship to the exact subjectivity that gave it a reason to exist — into a triumph story because the triumph story is more fun to be inside of.
episode seven might make a liar of me. fully reserve the right. but as of the premiere: we took a Black man’s story, handed it to the guy who wanted it told his way, scored it with power ballads, and everyone agreed to call losing the thread a reinvention
anyway. be normal about Louis in the notes. i’m begging
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