Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe Expands
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MOVIE REVIEW
Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches
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Genre: Fantasy, Horror
Year Released: 2023
Runtime: 8, ≈50m episodes
Showrunner(s): Esta Spalding
Writer(s): Various
Cast: Alexandra Daddario, Harry Hamlin, Tongayi Chirisa, Jack Huston, Annabeth Gish, Beth Grant, Erica Gimpel, Jen Richards
Where To Watch: streaming now on Shudder in the US, comes to Blu-ray and DVD on January 8, 2024 in the UK. Each episode will also be available to purchase on digital 24 hours after its transmission, courtesy of Acorn Media International.
RAVING REVIEW: If you liked AMC’s ANNE RICE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, get ready for more gothic tales in that same world. The Anne Rice Immortal Universe is AMC’s answer to the world-building that’s become so popular (see The Marvel Cinematic Universe.)
Based on Rice’s best-selling trilogy, “Lives of the Mayfair Witches,” we get a deeper dive into the supernatural world first seen in Interview. The series follows the Mayfair family, a wealthy and influential dynasty in New Orleans with a long history of otherworldly gifts and encounters. We see relationships and conflicts within the family and their interactions with the world around them (both natural and supernatural.)
Alexandra Daddario plays Rowan Fielding throughout the eight series episodes, a neurosurgeon who discovers she is the unlikely heir to the Mayfair family. This is only the start of her journey as the central protagonist in the series; she must uncover her past and her newly found family’s history. From what I’ve read, the novels this series is based on spend less time on Fielding’s “learning,” although it’s entirely unfair to judge a book versus an extended series. The amount of detail you can fit into a book versus a TV series or movie isn’t an equal comparison.
I’ve only screened the first five episodes of the series so far, and I hope some later episodes work on world-building within this shared universe. The possibilities are endless when you’re dealing with vampires and witches. I would love to see some of the crossover potentials; I’ll be interested to see what the next plan is for the future of this universe. AMC has the rights to 18 titles and has only scratched the surface. I’ll be intrigued to see if they can create something that will pull in fans who aren’t there to see the movie’s familiarity from 1994 or have just heard of it.
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[photo courtesy of AMC NETWORKS]
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Second para, its Mayfair, not Mayfield as written.
I would strongly suggest reading at least the first book thoroughly – the most glaring omission from the tv show (and the casting doesn’t seem to dispute the omission) is the absence of Michael, who becomes her boyfriend… he is fairly much fundamental in the actual story, and his removal entirely seems to do little more than portray this show as yet another feminist piece about the power of women who don’t need a man. It is a huge deviation from the book and story of the Mayfair journey and the story arch that to have done so is a nonsense. There is no cast listing on IMDB for Michael so one can only assume that indeed, the writers have just removed him entirely from Rowans story because to have him there would be contrary to the narrative they seem to want this to be about. The witching hour was by no means Anne Rice’s most popular book, and I believe this show will if it wants to have the book fans as watchers needs to work harder at telling the original story. It may well appear to millennials as a passing bit of entertainment fluff, but serious AR fans won’t stick about unless the story they tell is elevated in the tv medium, and my guess is based on casting that isn’t terribly likely. Alexandra is an entirely adequate actress, she is no Meryl Streep and i’m not sure that all her big eye innocent smiling thing is going to carry the show, and Jack Houston is a complete miscast – no offence but in the books Lasher is described I believe as ‘a most beautiful man’ and other such works, and at the risk of being a tad rude to Mr Houston, he is not even close to that – perhaps Matt Bomer or any other of the hundreds of actually good looking male actors out there could have been given that role, not someone who looks more like he is waiting for a happy hour at McDonalds than for his birth as a mortal being…. (yeah as I say, read the book)….
If you want to take a piece of work and do this, make it better, sadly this hasn’t happened and seems unlikely it will and i’ve only have the pleasure of a single episode thus far.
Michael,
Thank you so much for bringing that spelling error to my attention; I’ve updated that. I genuinely appreciate it, sometimes auto correct can do odd things. Also, my apologies for the delay in responding; I’ve been getting so much spam, and have been working on a better filter.
Have you been able to check out any of the other episodes so far?
Witches and the supernatural natural sounds exciting New Orleans definitely has a history of many strange things this is definitely getting added to my watch list