Featured Essays Anne Rice Immortal Universe The Anne Rice TV Universe Needs to Get Gayer  AMC didn’t balk at making subtext text in Interview With the Vampire. So why the shyness with their other shows? By Lacy Baugher Milas | Published on January 7, 2026 Image: AMC Comment 0 Share New Share Image: AMC AMC’s Interview with the Vampire is incredible television. In fact, it’s the sort of Anne Rice adaptation most of us who grew up loving her expansive fictional world of supernatural monsters and lavish excess likely thought we’d never get: Thematically rich, gorgeously rendered, and gay AF. The series fully embraces the homoeroticism that has always been simmering under the surface of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels, making the queer subtext fully text in glorious, screaming color. And while it is not always particularly true to the letter of its source material, the show gets its spirit exactly right, shifting details, character dynamics, and narrative truths in ways that still manage to say something new about both the original novel and the world we live in now. Perhaps most importantly, Interview remembers that it is, at its heart, a gay love story, deliberately drawing complex and compelling parallels between vampirism—specifically the otherness and isolation inherent in being an immortal—and queerness, through a twisted central romance that spans both decades and continents. The relationship between vampire Louis de Pont du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and his maker Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) is frequently toxic, often violent, and straight-up abusive at times. But it’s also thoroughly fascinating. Full of steamy sex and emotional betrayal, their relationship is the narrative engine that powers the rest of the story, and is clearly the series’s most important element (even when the two aren’t together onscreen).  Image: AMC With its combustible central characters, campy sensibilities, and lavish, over-the-top feel that drips with New Orleans-infused history, Interview makes for wildly addictive TV, building a rich and layered supernatural world that goes well beyond vampires and raising questions about how they all manage to co-exist alongside a humanity that’s largely unaware of their presence. And it’s found genuine success, posting fairly modest linear ratings, but racking up critical acclaim, streaming views, and an extremely vocal and loyal fanbase that seems eager for as much Rice-related content as they can get. And, thankfully, AMC appears to want to give it to them.  Thus far, the network has launched two other series in the larger “Immortal Universe” that’s based on Rice’s works: 2023’s Mayfair Witches and Talamasca: The Secret Order, which aired in the Fall of 2025. It’s unfortunately true that neither of these series quite manages to reach the dramatic, campy heights of their predecessor, but each still adds some intriguing new layers to the larger fictional world they all share. But both (along with any further spin-offs that may be in the franchise pipeline) could really stand to take some important lessons from the breakout series that initially started it all.  Image: AMC Both Mayfair Witches and Talamasca lack the romantic (in every sense of the word) sweep and scope of Interview, and—somewhat surprisingly—are also missing the overt queer overtones that help make Interview so much fun. Rice’s works are so popular precisely because of their larger-than-life characters, complex emotional stakes, and audacious, utterly fearless spirit. (Find me another author that has her main character become a global rock icon, meet Jesus, and have visions of the fall of Atlantis, I dare you.) Her books are beyond extra, and so are the characters at their centers. Or at least, they should be.  But where Interview finds the joy in updating Rice’s world for a new medium and a new generation, AMC’s adaptation of Mayfair Witches goes in the complete opposite direction. Flattening its source material’s frankly bonkers premise into the dullest possible version of itself, the show eschews the weirdest, freakiest elements of Rice’s original in favor of playing it painfully safe. Considering this is a story whose main character canonically sleeps with the demon who has been haunting her family for generations before she gives birth to him as her biological child (just go with it, it’s a long story), Mayfair Witches should feel free to try almost anything with its characters and their relationship dynamics. That it repeatedly chooses to do less than nothing is deeply frustrating and a real let-down for the fans who’ve waited so long to see this story onscreen. Image: AMC To be fair, the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy is notoriously unwieldy, a series of positive doorstopper novels whose story spans generations and crosses continents. Featuring over a dozen central characters, a demon curse, ghosts, and god-like immortal ancients, it’s full of dark themes that include (but are not limited to) rape, assault, forced pregnancy, possession, suicide, and murder, alongside a heaping dose of violence and copious sex. The Mayfairs, as a whole, are deeply messed up, boasting a family dynamic that comes complete with plenty of incest, manipulation, and monstrousness built right into its core. Given all of this, it’s almost shocking how unsexy the show that bears its name is. The characters have little chemistry, the various lovers lack sizzle, and the story doesn’t lean nearly hard enough into the most outlandish elements of its plot. Even the demon Lasher (Jack Huston), a being who is basically supposed to exude sex and temptation, tends to come off more as a guy who makes you want to cover your drink on sight. There’s no lush melodrama here. There’s barely even any fun. These choices feel doubly strange given that the Mayfair novels depict plenty of queerness and transgressive sexuality throughout the family’s history, from Katherine Mayfair’s occasional cross-dressing and Julien Mayfair’s open bisexuality to the inter-family incest that sits at the heart of Lasher’s quest to be reborn. Julien had multiple male lovers, was the only male Mayfair to wield significant supernatural power, and for whom Lasher called a storm to mark his death. (This is a whole thing, and only happens when the witch that Lasher has chosen passes.)  But the Julien that appears in the TV series bears no real resemblance to his book counterpart, and his relationships with men are not mentioned.  Image: AMC To its credit, Mayfair Witches does introduce the new character Josephine “Jojo” Mayfair (Jen Richards), Cortland Mayfair’s (Harry Hamlin) trans daughter, who is certainly intriguing in her own right. But the show doesn’t go nearly far enough when it comes to exploring the experience of a transwoman in a family where literal power is passed down through the matrilineal line. And these choices feel like nothing so much as severe missed opportunities: To tell more engrossing stories, to show us more complicated characters, to expand the kind of stories this fictional world is capable of telling. To be brash and bold and yes, gay AF, in the same way that Interview has been. The big shifts the series appears to be planning for its forthcoming third season—which will relocate to Salem, lack Lasher, and feature a bevy of new characters—means it has a chance for a fresh start, should it choose to claim it.  As for the third Immortal Universe series, Talamasca sits somewhere in the middle of the pack. The most straightforward installment of the franchise, the series isn’t based on a specific novel, but instead attempts to tell the story of the mysterious organization of scholars and spies that is heavily present throughout Rice’s works. As such, it has a certain narrative freedom its sister series do not, but it also hasn’t quite figured out what to do with it just yet. And, as a result, its first season, which follows the story of a young telepath (Nicholas Denton) recruited by the Talamasca to help track down a mysterious object, is overstuffed and uneven.  Image: AMC It isn’t until Guy becomes involved with the vampire Jasper (William Fichtner)—also searching for the same McGuffin-esque item—that the story seems to find something approaching a beating heart. Denton and Fichtner have the spiky, immediately sparky sort of chemistry that launches endless TikTok edits and a trauma-bonded, pseudo-frenemies vibe that sees them circling and betraying one another throughout the show’s first season. The Talamasca, as an organization, is sketchy enough to make Jasper’s cause (destroying them) fairly sympathetic, and Guy’s desire to find the truth the group has denied him helps their unexpected partnership feel almost desperately genuine, even as the show never quite settles on how much either of them truly trusts the other.  It’s fairly apparent that this particular onscreen pairing is as much an accident of chemistry as anything else, since the folks making the series seem as surprised as anyone else by the audience reaction to their dynamic (or the fan edits that seem to be drawing folks to the show based on that one scene of them rolling around on the floor of a parking garage). But, it’s obvious that the show’s simply more interesting when these characters are onscreen together, and no matter how you choose to read the interactions between them—in this fictional universe violent threats practically can be flirting if you want them to be—they make for substantially more entertaining television than the series’ traditional police procedural elements or Talamasca head Helen’s (Elizabeth McGovern) search for her long-lost sibling. The series may have stumbled into its best element almost completely by chance, but it’s almost certainly the one it needs to lean into the hardest if and when it comes back for a second season. Image: AMC Talamasca is probably never going to be the sort of show that’s willing to get quite as gay as the franchise’s flagship series. It’s got a completely different vibe and tone. And honestly, that’s okay. The point of a shared universe, after all, is that it allows a franchise the space to tell different kinds of stories in different ways. But it’s also not an accident that Talamasca’s at its most compelling when it’s doing the same things Interview does, namely poking at themes of trust, loneliness, memory, and loss. That it can, at least occasionally, find a way to do that while staying true to its grittier spy roots, means it’s already leaps and bounds ahead of Mayfair. But as we all gear up for the third season of Interview (now going by The Vampire Lestat) to premiere next year, here’s hoping the folks in charge of the rest of this universe are taking some copious notes. They’ve still got a lot to learn.[end-mark] The post The Anne Rice TV Universe Needs to Get Gayer  appeared first on Reactor.