“Interview With the Vampire,” the opening salvo of AMC’s attempt to turn the oeuvre of fantasy author Anne Rice into a so-called Immortal Universe of television shows, is one of the best shows on air. Smart, sensual and frequently funny, “Interview” manages the balancing act of all great adaptations in both preserving and updating its source material; I ecstatically await a Season 3 styled as a rock documentary about the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid).
This master plan’s sophomore effort, “Mayfair Witches,” has been a relative letdown. The scattered drama lacks the passion and eccentricity that are the, well, lifeblood of “Interview With the Vampire.” Nor does the starring vehicle for Alexandra Daddario offer a concise, specific take to differentiate itself from Rice’s original — its own version of making Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) a Black man who falls in love with his maker. A second season came and went earlier this year with minimal fanfare.
The third Immortal Universe show, “Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order” — which we will refer to from here on out as “Talamasca,” because let’s not be ridiculous — sadly hews closer to “Mayfair” than “Interview” in quality. The six-episode season, which was provided to critics in its entirety, is a disjointed and muddled attempt to turn Rice’s centuries-old secret society into a vehicle for a half-hearted spy thriller. The premiere has a couple bright spots in the form of cameos from “Interview” star Eric Bogosian and, in a confusing but welcome appearance, Jason Schwartzman as a vampire who lives in the penthouse of the Dakota. (Maybe he’s a big Rice fan, if not enough of one to stick around past a single episode.) Once these training wheels come off, though, “Talamasca” never achieves the momentum to chart its own path.
What is the Talamasca, exactly, and what do its members do? Answering these questions would seem to be a basic prerequisite of a show named after the fictional group, but “Talamasca” will leave viewers mostly in the dark. Creator John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”) and co-showrunner Mark Lafferty (“Halt and Catch Fire”) position protagonist Guy (Nicholas Denton) as a classic audience surrogate, speed-running a chosen one narrative as the telepath is recruited by mysterious Brit Helen (Elizabeth McGovern, channeling her “Downton Abbey” co-stars) to join the Talamasca in lieu of starting a lucrative law job. Where Guy’s abilities come from and how they fit into this world’s cosmology are never fully explained. Supposedly, the Talamasca are a mortal-led counterweight to paranormal forces like vampires and witches, but they clearly have some supernatural tools of their own.
Guy himself proves as generic a hero as his name. Denton, an Australian who could be cousins with Eddie Redmayne, struggles with his American accent even after his character gets shipped off to London to check in on a Talamasca “mother house” when another operative turns up dead. His training is supposed to take a year, but gets crammed into a week because time is of the essence — a compression that reads like a metaphor for this overstuffed, rushed-feeling season. Guy gets little motivation or personality besides the search for his mother, a fellow telepath he grew up in foster care believing to be dead. It turns out the Talamasca was behind not just his placement with a Florida family, but the scholarships that afforded him an elite education.
As if the Talamasca’s deep pockets and connections weren’t shady enough, Guy keeps getting standard-issue warnings about how “they’re lying to you” and “they can’t be trusted.” These flags come from a slew of secondary characters who abruptly rise and fade in significance as Guy tries to figure out where his loyalties should lie. The constantly shifting allegiances are meant to form a twisty yarn in the aggregate, though the effect is largely just confusing — especially when Helen gets a subplot investigating her own past that distracts from her role as the chilly, withholding boss.
The throughline here is a hunt for a MacGuffin known as the 752, named for the year of the Talamasca’s founding. It’s the backup of an archive that burned 50 years ago in a fire at the organization’s Amsterdam outpost, and Helen is hot on its trail at the same time as Jasper (William Fichtner), a vampire with an axe to grind against the Talamasca. Fichtner is alone in the cast in giving a performance with the flair Rice’s prose deserves, perhaps because only Jasper gets nonsensical-yet-hilarious lines like “You are a flea bouncing off the hard dick of our immortal history!” But Jasper is outnumbered by perfunctory elements like the 752, Guy’s mother and Helen’s own long-lost family, none of which successfully infuse a sense of urgency.
With “Talamasca,” the underwhelming entries in the Immortal Universe now outnumber the exciting ones. Though “Talamasca” ends with enough balls in the air that a Season 2 seems assured, no additional concepts have been ordered to series. Before that happens, some introspection might be in order as to why neither “Mayfair” nor “Talamasca” has measured up to the operatic thrills of “Interview.” Until then, fans will just have to wait for “The Vampire Lestat.”
“Anne Rice’s Talamasca: The Secret Order” will premiere with two episodes on AMC and AMC+ on Oct. 26 at 9 p.m. ET.
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