‘Interview with the Vampire’
If you don’t have a subscription to AMC+, but you do have a subscription to Max: you’re in luck, because you can stream the first season of one of 2022’s best shows. Thanks to a “programming pop up,” over 200 AMC episodes are streaming on Max through the end of October, Interview with the Vampire among them — just in time for the Halloween season. The TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel reimagines the setting (beginning in the 1910s, instead of the book’s 1790s) and the main character (instead of a white plantation owner, Louis de Pointe du Lac is now a wealthy Black man), but the story arc remains largely unchanged: Louis (Jacob Anderson), wracked with guilt and grief, is looking for a way out when the charismatic vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) enters his life and Louis is promptly romanced and then turned into a vampire himself. The series is notable and differs from the 1994 film adaptation in part because it embraces and doesn’t simply imply the queer elements that have always existed on the page. In that regard, Anderson and Reid have electric chemistry from the moment they meet in the pilot and it only grows more as the seven-episode season progresses.