Yes! Rewatching is practically built into the show's design (and the showrunners are fully betting on their audience to do this). The show, very much like a play, has been planting thematic and character seeds early but dressing them up as casual TV banter or background visuals so they don't feel like heavy "plot devices" until years later.
Rolin Jones and the writing team basically write like playwrights who stole a Hollywood budget. What this means for the show (besides them hiring a lot of theater people):
They approach the series with the entire TVC universe in mind. This is what I meant by “playing the long game", they use entire seasons to serve as acts in a play. They establish the "skeleton" first (which would include the milestones and key pillars in the story) and then flesh it out per season. They even apply a three-act structure within each season (This is why episode 5 of every season is always a turning point! Or like in a play, where the final act can recontextualize everything you saw in Act I, the final episode of each season is always a surprising plot-twist that makes you want to reexamine everything you saw before.)
Playwriting is very much dialogue-driven (as they can’t depend on visuals the way screenwriters can). This is why the show is capable of writing elaborate and compelling dialogue constructed with rhythm and cadence rather than just characters exchanging info. Think back to what Jacob Anderson and other cast members have said about how easy it is to memorize long lines because of how easy they flow. Or the beautiful and dramatic monologues sprinkled throughout the show (Louis’ in s1ep1 or Akasha’s in s3ep5)...very much theater-coded.
Plays in comparison to TV scripts focus a lot more on examining deeper core themes (abusive love, memory, performance, etc.). This is why this adaptation is more focused on capturing emotional themes like mourning and loss within Anne Rice's books, rather than literally repeating story beats. This is why the show strays from the source material but still feels true to it.
All the literary devices applied by plays being used to shape the show: foreshadowing, metaphors (think back to the hurricane outside during Loustat’s reunion to highlight the internal conflict of the characters), mirroring (gabriella/lestat and lestat/claudia to showcase generational trauma), foils (the contrast between Armand and Lestat that will be highlighted more and more as the show progresses), context clues dispersed across seasons (Lestat controlling the soldiers to exit in s1 only to be paid off in s2’s finale), etc.
Playwrights especially write for the attentive audiences who can catch callbacks and contradictory statements, because they believe the audience is actively listening, not passively consuming. This is why spoon feeding or dumbing down the show for its audience won’t happen regardless of the current state of our collective attention spans.
We are also very fortunate that the show creators are also experienced screenwriters, resulting in a grand, gothic stage tragedy balanced with a good understanding of TV seduction and spectacle. I’m sure the show is not without its flaws, but it's honestly one of the best shows on tv for at least the last decade.
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