It’s easy to feel that you’ve arrived at The Vampire Lestat both a little early and a little late. Lestat is the third season of AMC’s TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series of novels, the first of which was famously the source text for the cult classic 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The novel tracks the on-again, off-again relationship between a flamboyant French vampire named Lestat and Louis, the man he turns into a vampire in late-eighteenth-century Louisiana. Transforming from mentor and mentee to frenemies to foes over the course of centuries, Lestat and Louis are an enigmatic couple. In adapting the book for TV, creator Rolin Jones remained largely faithful, with a couple of key exceptions: He converted Louis from a white slave owner to a Black brothel owner, and he made Louis and Lestat lovers.
There was always a quiet, and sometimes not-so-quiet, queer subtext to Rice’s novels, but the show—which was called Interview With the Vampire for its first two seasons, after the title of the first novel, and is now called The Vampire Lestat, after the title of the sequel—brings that same-sex eroticism to the surface. The series is bloody and horny, devastatingly sad and riotously funny, deadpan and melodramatic. It can take new viewers a moment to adjust to the fact that every dial on this show is turned up to 11. It’s an immersive experience of excess, a feast for and an attack on the senses.
In the murky, endless swamp of the streaming landscape, you might happen upon a program as singular as this one and be tempted to say you’ve discovered a hidden gem. You wouldn’t be all that wrong, at least about the “hidden” part. Lestat airs on AMC and on its subscription streaming app AMC+, a service dwarfed by juggernauts like Netflix and Prime Video. And the series isn’t even the biggest draw for its own service, which is anchored by the Walking Dead franchise. From a marketing standpoint, it can’t be a great idea to change your title two seasons in. Regardless, not a lot of people had access to the show, and, of those who did, not a lot watched it.
But what’s special about this drama is the intensity of its niche. Spend any time on social media talking or reading about TV, and you’re likely to encounter the show’s committed fans, nearly feral in their advocacy for this under-watched treasure. TV critics love it, too—the second season appeared on over 20 year-end best-of lists in 2024. So, addressing both the plurality of readers who have never heard of this crazy show and the thin sliver of readers who would gladly take a stake through the heart for it, I say: There’s nothing else like The Vampire Lestat on TV, nothing that can consume you quite the way it does.
For two seasons, it was built around the titular “interview” Louis gives to intrepid, endangered journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, doing his best Anthony Bourdain). Louis (Jacob Anderson) related the whole torrid story of his entanglement, affair, and multiple criminal monstrosities with Lestat (Sam Reid) from the steely blandness of a Dubai penthouse in the present day. One of the show’s signatures, then, relying on Louis’s voice-over narration but also his expansive sense of time, was the nesting style of its flashback structure. For instance, at one point in the second season, the narrative moves back and forth between Lestat co-founding the Théâtre des Vampires coven in Paris in the eighteenth century and Louis’s experiences with the group after World War II, and between Louis telling these stories to Daniel in Dubai in the present and Louis telling these stories to a younger Daniel in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Never jarring, the striated layers of time form a dense and luxurious texture for what is both an intimate romance and an epic adventure.
Now that the show has begun adapting Rice’s second novel in the series, the narrative voice has shifted from Louis to Lestat, and it’s not a small shift. Where Louis could be full of quietly simmering mourning or rage, Lestat is loud and upset. By the end of the second season, all the narrative threads were essentially tied up, so, in order to reproduce the show’s sense of chaotic temporality, we move forward again in time. The opening scene of The Vampire Lestat is a secret auction, sometime in the future, that reveals two important twists. First, apparently there’s been some sort of massive global catastrophe brought on by Lestat, leaving Louis with a limp and Louis’s ex-lover Armand (Assad Zaman) with a rather dashing eye-patch. And second, Lestat is a rock star now. This season’s voice-over narration consists of a series of vinyl albums recorded by Lestat that tell us how it all went down from his perspective.
Historically, TV shows have a hard time representing art within a work of art. In other words, it’s difficult, when you’re already working hard at making a good piece of TV, to then set yourself the task of creating a second, different work that functionally exists within your TV production. Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a famous failed attempt at this—the behind-the-scenes drama about an SNL-like sketch comedy series face-planted by including scenes of dismally unfunny sketches that we viewers were supposed to understand to be cutting-edge, urbane comedy. 30 Rock got around the problem by making its show within a show deliberately bad: TGS With Tracy Jordan was so preposterous that it got a laugh whenever we saw it on-screen. If you can’t make two good TV shows simultaneously, then make one of them a joke.
True to its more-is-more ethos, The Vampire Lestat has decided to pursue both strategies in its depiction of Lestat’s career in rock and roll. Many of the songs Lestat sings are bad. Lyrically, they can tend toward the cringeworthy—there is a higher-than-average amount of nonsense syllables in these tracks—and musically, they sound a little bit like lost T. Rex B-sides. Their energy is appealing, but it’s hard to imagine cuing up the soundtrack on Spotify. So, to some extent, Lestat is meant to appear a bit ridiculous, so long-lived that his creative juices are not especially fresh. (How else to explain a full-on glam rock revival touring in the mid-2020s?) Daniel roasts him about this, and a rival vampire gang tells him one of his songs sucks. (He begrudgingly agrees.) Is it possible that Lestat has simply hypnotized his audience into liking him?
And yet, there’s Reid’s stage presence. Writhing and growling and glaring and surfing through the crowd, Lestat may be singing songs that sound as if they were written for a rock star on a TV show, but he’s embodying every bit of rock star charisma you might hope to see in real life. In fact, as a promotional stunt for the release of the new series, Reid performed a show in character at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and, by all reports, the crowd’s Beatlemania-style response felt real. It’s rare, in this sort of prestige narrative drama to say that a selling point of the show is its sense of spectacle. In previous seasons, those spectacles have been spectacles of sex and violence and, occasionally, theatrical performance. This season, it’s the close-quarters grinding intensity of a killer club show.
All of this takes place in the wake of the release of Daniel’s book, the record of his two-season interview with Louis. Technically, Daniel’s bestseller has outed the vampire community to the world, but most still believe it to be a hoax. So Lestat’s act manages to be both an ultimate reveal of his true self and, for many if not most of his audience members, an expertly crafted bit. That tension between the performed self and the real self is at the heart of this season’s story, especially for a character who is always putting on a show. The arrival of Lestat’s mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle)—whom he turned into a vampire, and with whom he murdered his entire family, and who is also his lover—turns a kaleidoscopic lens onto the character and the question of why nobody, it seems, can ever let him go.
Watching The Vampire Lestat and thinking about its devoted fandom, I’ve been reminded of another underseen AMC program that’s attracted a surprisingly committed following. The Terror was a stand-alone series (the first of a three-season anthology) about a fictionalized nineteenth-century Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage. It is an incredible show, filled with compelling performances from a who’s who of British television actors and built around a bizarrely compelling mythology that invokes questions of imperialism, repression, and masculine fragility. The show was a moderate success, but never a big deal. It is, however, a big deal to the attendees of Terror Camp, an annual conference born from the show. With academic presentations on subjects from race and nationalism to Arctic exploration literature, it is a uniquely passionate, positive event. The fans, many of whom are nonbinary and drawn to the drama’s fluid presentation of gender, call themselves “Cold Boys.”
There’s been a lot of discussion in critical circles this year about the rise of “toxic” fandoms: viewers who have harassed the stars of Heated Rivalry online, for instance, or fans of The Pitt who castigate the series’ writers for not focusing enough on the characters’ personal lives. But the idea of fandom is community. Lots of communities we don’t call fandoms get toxic or even violent. The beauty and glory of a small, passionate fandom—like that of The Terror or of The Vampire Lestat—is that it takes this massive, mainstream medium, and it builds a pocket of appreciation and connection for the people inside it. If Lestat hasn’t attracted a massive national audience, that also means that its own invested audience has the place to themselves. This third season, coincidentally and on purpose, is in some ways about that. Sure, being a superfan of the rock star Lestat might kill you, but being a part of the Lestat fandom might well bring you to life.
