Everyone has heard of the sophomore slump.
It essentially means a regression, and many shows have fallen into this trap. After delivering a stellar first season, missteps and misfires during the second season cause the audience to second-guess their initial excitement about the series.
It happens more often than you think, even to shows you may think are destined to succeed.
One of those shows that everyone wondered about after its masterful first season was Interview with the Vampire.
The Anne Rice classic was reworked for the small screen and delivered one of the best pilots of the last decade.
Interview with the Vampire Season 1 Episode 1 was as thrilling a piece of television as you’ll ever see. It introduced New Orleans and Louis de Pointe du Lac, a vampire recounting his past to Daniel Molloy for a second time.
Jacob Anderson was a revelation as Louis, a vampire with a complicated and devastating history who struggled with what it meant to be a vampire.
Louis is the heartbeat of the series, as we see things through his eyes. He is often the one recounting his tales via word or print.
And while Louis is at the center of everything, Lestat de Lioncourt, the hedonistic French vampire and Louis’s maker, was right by his side. Even in supposed death, Lestat was a presence throughout the second season, which picked up exactly where Interview with the Vampire Season 1 left off.
Interview with the Vampire Season 2 started with Louis and Claudia, a spellbinding and scenes-stealing Delainey Hayles stepping into the role originally played by Bailey Bass, traversing Europe at the end of World War II to look for other vampires.
There’s an interesting dichotomy between the two vampires during this time, as you continue to see their fractures as two immortal beings who approach their lives as vampires in different ways.
The most fascinating parts of the early hours are seeing Louis and Claudia adjust to their new reality without the oppression of Lestat wearing down on them.
They love each other but struggle, and their differences become more evident when Armand enters the equation.
Armand’s expanded role in the second season is probably the best part of it because of his role in every character’s life.
He has a connection to Louis, Lestat, Claudia, and Daniel, and it helps shape all those characters, their histories, and their futures.
Taking the series from New Orleans and the beautiful set pieces to France during a different period opens the show up to a different look, and the show is visually just as stunning as the first season.
It’s dark, obviously, but it leans into the muted tones of a Paris after-dark where vampires hide in plain sight.
Claudia and Louis start to build a new life for themselves within a coven that Claudia craves, and Louis wants nothing to do with.
While Claudia adjusts to coven life, an initiation process that feels akin to a sorority pledging period in some aspects, Louis dives into the wonderment of the city, a burgeoning romance with Armand, and the looming specter of Lestat, whom Louis struggles to let go of.
Some fans were worried coming into the season about how much Lestat would be present, as this part of the story details Louis and Claudia’s journeys without their beleaguered maker.
But Sam Reid’s magnetic Lestat is always there in Louis’s subconscious, lingering just under the surface until Louis can finally move on from him. Or did he?
Lestat naturally takes a backseat in this season.
While he’s an instrumental part of the narrative, and Sam Reid has injected a level of campy, deliciousness that rivals, if not surpasses, Tom Cruise’s performance in the 1990s Interview with the Vampire film.
The series makes the most of his time on screen, especially during the times when he is merely a figment of Louis’s imagination.
Louis and Lestat’s relationship was central to the first season, but it’s a secondary piece in the second effort.
The show is only stronger for it, especially as it dives into pieces of Lestat’s otherwise unexplored past and showcases Louis grappling with what that relationship meant to him on a fundamental level as lovers and through the maker bond.
Every episode could be on anyone’s ‘best of’ because the season is that well written and acted.
Each episode feels like the act of an incredible movie, as it all leads to something more significant and larger until we reach what could be the true climax of the season in Interview with the Vampire Season 2 Episode 7.
The vampiric trial is a gaudy theater performance, with an audience full of humans watching three vampires beaten down physically and emotionally, all while the gleeful vampire coven watches them lose their resolve under the watchful eyes of the cunning and devious Santiago.
It’s a thrilling episode from start to finish, and Delainey Hayles is absolute perfection as she does her damndest to fight back within a “trial” she was always going to lose.
Of all the many questions that arose after the first season, what happened to Claudia was always at the top of the list. This series does well in limiting the trial to a single episode, opting not to drag it out when they could have done it very well.
And that’s the beauty of the season as a whole. The show knows itself so well, and it leans into its strengths.
They have dynamic chemistry amongst the cast, and it’s on full display in various episodes, through big and smaller moments.
When Claudia and Madeline embrace one another, reality sets in for Claudia that her happily ever after has been crushed by the very group she once so desperately wanted to belong to.
You’re mesmerized by the look in Hayles’s eyes as she stares at her maker, one last look from a child to the one person she thought was meant to protect her.
Good television can leave you speechless, in tears, or screaming in agony or pain. It can also leave you breathless.
The image of Claudia being burned alive, her body floating away while singing “I Don’t Like Windows When They’re Closed,” will stick with you for a long time, as will so many scenes from the season.
Louis and Armand have a destructive argument during Interview with the Vampire Season 2 Episode 5, in which both vampires unleash their fury and resentment toward one another after decades of cohabitation in the aftermath of everything that happened in Paris.
There’s also Interview with the Vampire Season 2 Episode 8, in which Louis learns the truth about Armand, what really happened behind the scenes of the trial, and Armand’s role in it.
It all leads to Louis and Lestat sharing their first present-day interaction, an emotionally devastating moment between two broken vampires who’ve lived lifetimes and lifetimes and endured traumas both together and apart but now find themselves in this time of limbo as they move forward from the past.
Will they eventually choose to do that together? What will become of Vampire Daniel? And where is Armand?
The season featured various questions that were slowly solved over time. It picked up on loose threads from the first season and crafted a brand-new narrative that was equally as compelling, if not more so.
We are thick in the middle of award season now, where many deserving shows get their due in a field that is so densely populated now between broadcast, premium channels, and streaming.
It can feel like we’re in a Golden Age of television, and while that may be somewhat true, we’re also in a changing world of television.
Long gone are 22-plus episode seasons, replaced by shows on cable and streaming series shelving out 8-10 episode seasons with long hiatuses. By the time the series returns, it’s been so long that audiences forget what came before.
Interview with the Vampire fits into that category, but that’s not a knock against it because it’s so captivating that the wait only increases the demand.
Audiences were clamoring for season two, and it exceeded every expectation.
You may not see it on awards lists, which is disappointing, but don’t let those snubs fool you into thinking what you watched wasn’t some of the year’s most well-written, directed, and acted hours of television.
Gothic horror shows never get the credit they deserve for reasons I can’t fathom, but nothing about this show has ever felt perfunctory. It’s not your typical anything.
It stands apart from anything in that genre, and while it may not get the love it deserves when it comes to shiny statues, that does nothing to hamper its legacy as the best entry in the Anne Rice Universe and one of the best damn television shows of the year.
Let us know your thoughts on the series in the comments! We’d love to chat about this gem of a show!
Watch Interview with the Vampire Online
