Review: Interview With the Vampire, Season 2 at Strange Horizons

The first season of Interview With the Vampire, based on the famed (and already-adapted) novel by Anne Rice, was something that I approached with a bit of trepidation, and quickly fell head over heels for. I'm not a fan of Rice's novels or the book's previous adaptation, and yet this new version of Louis, Lestat, Armand, and their endlessly convoluted and tortured relationships quickly won me over with smart writing, great performances, and sharp humor. In its second season, which aired earlier this summer, the show shot past its previous high performance and quickly became one of the best shows on TV. As I discuss in my review of the second season in Strange Horizons, a big part of that achievement comes down to the fascinating games it plays with faithfulness to its source material.

Published in 1976, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice's vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It's a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against ("People still fall for that Anne Rice routine," a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC's adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully. It is, in some ways, an extremely faithful adaptation. Showrunner Rolin Jones and his team have spoken about the novel and its sequels with great fondness, and their version takes care to preserve whole stretches of dialogue, or to remember that a certain character went to her death wearing a yellow dress. The two seasons that have aired follow the novel's plot almost to the letter. Yet, within the confines of that faithfulness, this version of Interview with the Vampire also plays elaborate games with its source material. Without changing the story in its essence, and without running away from its cheesiness, it produces something that is at once a retelling, an updating, and a sequel to the original.

It's a long review, but I still don't feel that I've done justice to all the ways in which this show is fantastic. I've said only a little about the brilliance of the performances—Sam Reid is getting the lion's share of attention, but Jacob Anderson does a brilliant job as a character who in the original novel and the 1994 movie was stultifyingly boring, and who here becomes ambitious, dynamic, and occasionally cruel without ever losing Louis's fundamental sadness; and Eric Bogosian is a constant delight as a much-older version of the interviewer who is no longer as awed by the supernatural as he was in his youth, but who still finds himself drawn into his subjects' decades-old soap opera. The show's production design, too, is a marvel--on her tumblr, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has been doing excellent work analyzing the costume and production design. It's truly one of the most excitingly excellent shows on TV, and you should give it a chance even if, like me, you're a little put off by the source material