This isn’t the right blog for a TVL rant but even after half posting it on serializd I’m still pissed off so I just have to get it out before it eats up my soul.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my life seen a more disastrous and quick decline in quality between seasons - or even just in between episodes - in any show ever. Like I do not know how you could be able to watch this after the two seasons of IWTV and not see it as a complete bastardization of everything that came before it. This goes beyond being a competent adaptation or handling changes of tone, this is about pissing on the ashes of your previous work.
It truly seems that the showrunners were so wrapped up in their idea of making something entirely new and different that they forgot to make it fucking good.
In hindsight it’s hilarious that they even bothered to change the name of the show to The Vampire Lestat in the first place, because nothing in the actual season shows any care on Lestat as an actual complex character with his own interiority.
The show systematically refuses to ever actually bring forward a compelling narrative arc for Lestat or to look beyond his insufferable persona to show the emotional core of the character. It refuses to actually do… anything with him, actually.
The show skims Lestat story in favour of a vapid, utterly empty and charmeless modern plot and a series of songs that are supposed to be a view of his interiority but with lyrics so awful and surface level that all they accomplish is derailing the plot further.
The narration of his past is sped past without care, characters and events just pop up and are robbed of all narrative and emotional weight, nothing ever actually gets reevaluated or deconstructed by him - nothing means anything at all in the end. How do you adapt a book that is ultimately about identity and introspective without any of it? What is even the fucking point?
And frankly, I don’t understand what a non book reader would understand from half of the scenes, and I don’t get why they would care about the rest. The two main examples of this are the scene of the wolves and the character of Nicky: the wolves scene is pivotal for Lestat’s character in the source material, as proved by the repetition of the name “Wolfkiller” by the other characters and, crucially, his maker - in the show the scene is given maybe less than a minute, almost nothing is shown on screen and the narration moves on from it quickly; yet, the repetition of the name Wolfkiller is maintained, even when no weight is given by the actual writing. Nicky is similar, he’s cited as the one first true love of Lestat, once again pivotal for his story; this is expressed by the show in quick words but never really shown - Nicky appears for a moment, before rapidly descending into out-of-context madness. Why would someone that hasn’t read the book care about any of this? The show doesn’t seem to care either.
And this isn’t even mentioning the many events just… happening off-screen? Who made the show-not-tell rule passé? This is again not a matter of adapting book material, this happens with big events added by the show itself.
Lestat is then, hilariously, further rendered into a vapid character by being absolved of any possible fault by the writing. The complex relationship with Louis and Claudia? The suffering he has caused? Well actually, you see, he has the blood of Akasha in him, so it’s really unfair to judge - and Claudia did say Louis was actually the worst of the two, so it’s alright. The trial? Oh, just forget about it. Nicky? Well he never actually abandoned him or did anything, Nicky just cut his hand off because he was crazy. Marius and Akasha? Well he didn’t go look for them, Marius actually found him. The vampire apocalypse? Well yes he did bring it down, but actually, really, his mommy manipulated him into it. You just have to laugh.
Why do the writers wanna rob Lestat of all complexity and agency so desperately? They really don’t seem to have any interest of doing that to any other character. And really, why do you want to convince me he is a moron unable to talk without a quip every three words?
It’s also incredible how hard the writers work to disenchant you from any possible narrative. Not even the previous seasons are safe, everything is covered in fake self-aware irony - embarrassed by a detail from your own past writing? Annoyed by the constraints of a previous season? No worries, a sarcastic self referential quip will fix it all. It’s just cowardly writing all the way down.
There’s none of the subtlety or subtext of the first two seasons, and there’s certainly no sincerity to be found anywhere.
It’s incredible how depressing it is to try to have a conversation about the quality of the writing and narration on here or any other site, because no matter what you will still get people responding with a variable of "well Lestat is narrating and he’s chaotic / well Lestat is this and that". And like, newsflash, Lestat isn’t real and Lestat is a character written by people, not an ancient spirit that has magically gained sentience; I think it would be good for everyone to remember that while desperately trying to excuse bad writing with in-universe reasons. And obviously this is a known and general fandom issue, but it seems that the concept of having unreliable narrators has opened the floodgates for finding any possible excuse.
It’s endlessly frustrating, because I know they were able to write good characters - or, at least, the writers (mostly black btw) that got sacked were.
Both Lestat and every other character in this season is victim of a complete bastardization, both by the standards of the characterization set by the book AND by the fucking SHOW. They have the gall to reference things from the book while completely removing the context that surrounds them - because why would we want narrative coherence? Even new characters aren’t safe, as they are simply flattened to their most uninteresting and moronic self; Gabriella being the shining example of this (and many other issues that I don't even have the strenght to bring up rn).
This is not even mentioning the disrespect brought onto the actors of color; the choice to race swap characters and then abuse them beyond any measure and scope of the book, in an undeniably racialized manner, is beyond disgusting and it’s impossible to ignore at this point. The scene in the finale has particular connotations for both Louis and Armand in different ways (atp you cannot call what's happening to Louis anything other than lynching, and Armand, a muslim man (in the context given by the show), livestreaming a beheding in a jewish butchery specifically during Shabbat goes beyond just bad optics) and this ignoring so many other moments of writing.
In general, Louis is no more the complex character still too close to human morality; he’s a pimp and a long string of unrepeatable racist remarks; his relationship with Claudia is not allowed to be complex anymore, he’s uniquely at fault for anything that happened to her and she never held any love for him in the first place; he’s not struggling with grief and culpability for events that also saw him as victim; he’s again at fault and must endure endless brutalization to make non-specified amends.
Armand is no more the ineffable beauty core of his tragedy, he’s a gremlin, boring and repulsive or simply a twink; inaction is not his fatal flaw anymore, he's actually the one with an evil masterplan all along; he’s not acting out of desperation or for any deep-set reason, he’s just the cartoony psychopath of any mediocre show, evil for the sake of evil.
How can anyone not see this as the ultimate insult from a show that was built from day one on the shoulders of actors and writers of color?
How is not every fan losing their minds over it all. How are so many people uncritically loving S3. What the fuck man.
Finally, I think the most laughably insane part of this entire s3 debacle is that Rolin Jones genuinely thinks that he's some kind of genius who has just created their misunderstood masterpiece, and not a hack who is totally unable to take criticism and who seems so incredibly insecure about the fact that s1-2 are more universally praised than the adaptation he's actually been wanting to do all this time. And even more insane is having to see how every writer or cast member being interviewed about the finale is forced to run in circles trying to find justifications for any of it as Rolin just laughs in the background.
