Love Isn’t Love Enough

I remember feeling very worried as the premiere for TVL approached bc i had so greatly enjoyed the 2 seasons of IWTV that i was afraid it wasn't going to live up to my expectations, specially bc i'm already not big on modern settings for fantasy sooo i was a bit nervy. i sort of reassured myself that 1. TVL is not IWTV, its tonally different for a reason. and 2. even if its not the same as IWTV the characters i love are still there and the production of the show will make it a good season. after watching episode one and taking a whole full week to digest it i can safely say that im very dissapointed. Leaving what i know of IWTV aside, If i were a new viewer and interest in the vampire chronicles depended on this one premiere episode i would NOT return to watch more. i feel like my excitement for this season went from 100 to 0. Im not the possibility that there may be stuff ahead that i will enjoy more, but so far this one episode left me with a very sour, gliterry taste in my mouth.

starting off with the bizarre narration. now i get that a big theme in iwtv and tvl is the way different unrealible narrators choose to tell the same tale. and i already knew coming into this season that Lestat's narration was going to be much more different than louis. But i swear i could not stand to hear lestat talk. And i dont mean the erratic narration, but how painfully contemporary the whole thing was. there's nothing that takes me out of a story more than hearing a character mention social media or a modern celebrity abd theres a loook of that this epoisode. and its part of a bigger issue i had the entire thing which was that all the dialogue felt strange, from the writing to the delivery it felt oddly wooden to me. i didnt see the characters talking i saw the actors reciting a script. idk how to explain it any other way. its not that they felt "different" its that they felt flat.

im also somewhat hurt by how much of a joke the whole thing felt like. when discussing the episode after my watch party the response i goit from my friends was that "of course lestat is a loser, this is not Louis narration, it's drugged up, washed out lestat's narration" and like, sure i GET it. but that does not make me enjoy it any more than i did, which was very little. there was something absolutely horrendous about seeing a character that i had lerned to enjoy as an extremely nuanced complex person be a joke the entire time. name dropping labubus and reddit and god knows what else. And like i see what the entent behind it is, i see the harsh contrast being a showcase of lestat's poor mess of a life. but i could not be amused by it, it was, quite frankly, cringe.

"oh but its SUPPOSED to be cringe" ok. its still painfully cringe to watch. the dialoge was cringe, the music was cringe. everything everything. was bad imo. The acting? idk why but it felt so off.

honestly the only parts i enjoyed where the brief moments of Daniel, the very beggening at the auction and the scene with Gabrielle at the very end. other than that i honestly feel like the whole thing is a mess and not in the way its supposed to be. i feel hesitant to watch the 2nd episode out of fear it will not be any better than the first.