Best queer culture of 2024: Interview with the Vampire
A show bold enough to ask 'what if boyfriend drama never ended'?
TV is a fractured, vicious landscape of squabbling streaming behemoths grinding quality shows under their tracks in search for ultimate supremacy. This means that not only do so many of the best shows get lost in the noise, but there’s more than an outside chance that they’ll be cancelled as a result.
Which is why I’m so glad that the absolute FEAST of a show, Interview with the Vampire on AMC not only got a second season off the back of some rave critical reviews, but an uptick in popularity thanks to a Netflix deal in some countries. So many streamers are going conservative, safe, milquetoast as a result of the competition, but Interview with the Vampire is just the absolute opposite of that, a melodramatic opera of a show, that leans in so hard to every choice that you’re almost overwhelmed with the emotion, the sumptuousness of it all. It’s beautifully written, impeccably shot, exquisitely paced, and season 2 zooms in on the character drama at the unbeating heart of the show.
The show follows journalist Daniel Molloy (who gives me a kind of grumpy Bourdain vibe?) as he gets an interview with the brooding vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), in a tell-all about his immortal life, including his torrid and incredibly hot relationship with Lestat de Lioncourt (Australia’s Sam Reid). There are other very important relationships and characters, including the unstable child-vampire Claudia and Louis’ new paramour Armand, but at its heart the show is about the obsessive love between these two ancient boyfriends.
At the end of the first season, there’s a very dramatic breakup (it’s murder), and the way that Louis spends the next hundred years or whatever (I’m not good with time) obsessing over his ex is absolutely the epitome of queer culture. I can’t tell you how confronting it was to see all my pettiness and anguish and misplaced passion after a breakup blown up into a century spanning epic. He even moves to Paris and finds an emotionally manipulative (and how) rebound! Queer culture! The grasping, vindictive, passion of this immortal queer breakup story is something I haven’t really had a chance to immerse myself into before, and in a year that has personally been ruled by big queer passions, something I needed in juxtaposition to the starry eyed optimism of something like Heartstopper. I needed a story of love turned into heartbreak so black and passionate that it had gone septic, forced to lived long past its due date thanks to the vampires who carry it.
It doesn’t just stop there - we get love triangle, we get betrayal, we get a queer friendship group imploding and ending in a Parisian motorcycle battle. Come ON! This show has EVERYTHING. Oh god and the Parisian vampire fashion???
Anne Rice has always written her vampires as being cursed. This has led to the more insipid popular versions like True Blood and even Twilight, which fundamentally miss the reason Rice shows immortality as an affliction: having to feel emotions forever, unending, at such height and drama that they will send you mad. It’s not the bloodlust, it’s not (just) the loneliness - it’s the horror of feeling, anything, forever.
There’s so much about this show that thrills me on a fundamental level, such as the incredibly hot gay sex that we’re treated to on screen. But ultimately the show goes so big, so operatic in its scope, that it edges into camp. The fact that much of the season is spent in Paris in a vampire’s coven that performs terrifying vampire-specific theatre of the cruel is just this ridiculous choice that is justified into brilliance every step of the way. It’s a confronting story at times, with a deep sadness and violence at its heart. After one particularly heartbreaking episode, I had to take a break from the show for a week, even though I had another episode to look forward to.
There is also a twist on a twist in the season that while not truly out of the blue, it’s done in such a clever way that it changes your perception of the entire show, stretching all the way back to the first episode of season 1.
The plot demands that you take it seriously, and I don’t think it would be possible considering some of the more outrageous elements of melodrama, without every actor absolutely hitting every beat with everything they have. They’re all amazing, not a weak moment among them - but Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid are so charismatic that the obsession they feel for each other spills over. In season 2, Sam Reid’s Lestat blows into another level of insane magnetism - which only makes me look forward to the next season, which will focus mostly on him.
I can’t wait.
HONOURABLE QUEER CULTURE MENTIONS:
Challengers: thank you for the bisexual churro scene.
Agatha All Along: thanks for some gay witches who sing.
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