Welcome to my recaps of The Vampire Lestat! Thoughts on the season premiere, "Detroit" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as Albanian gangsters who find my doppelgänger working consturction in the Czech Republic...
Alan Sepinwall
Whether you want to call this Season One of an Interview with the Vampire spinoff of a retitled third season of Interview, The Vampire Lestat is a huge swing. The POV shifts from Louis to Lestat. The story is largely set in the present, surrounded by the framing sequence of the auction (and Lestat's audio journal of the period we're watching), plus flashbacks to his past. And even the contemporary scenes are presented out of order, like when Lestat starts talking about the brawl with the Fang Gang well before we get to the actual fight. The tone is also wildly different from the bulk of Interview. Louis was a tortured soul wrestling with regret, where Lestat is... well, he's also clearly tortured, but he presents himself as far more amused, and amusing, than his former lover. There's comedy early and often. Even though Daniel is back in an interviewing capacity, his relationship with Lestat doesn't resemble how he interacted with Louis. Not only is he a vampire himself now — one capable of saving Lestat when the regionals are about to overwhelm him — he now knows a whole lot more about the dynamics at play here, and is even bolder about challenging and outright mocking what his subject is telling him.
And yet... it still feels like part of the same series. As I said in my review, I think things work even better this way than they did in the earlier seasons/show. But all the DNA is still there: a vampire wrestling with his many literal and figurative demons, an ongoing conversation with a cynical journalist, ominous hints of what's coming down the road, etc.. Even Lestat's new career as a rock star is just a larger-scale version of what the vampire theater troupe was doing in Paris in Season Two: he puts his true self out into the world, and bites people mid-concert, and fans are both delighted and too naive to think that any of this is real. If vampires were somehow real, and Lestat actually were a vampire, after all, why would he be foolish enough to parade this fact in front of thousands of people filming him with their phones?