But, after Louis joins the undead, he only clings more firmly to the tatters of his humanity. This crushing reality creates a rift between him and Lestat, who presumes that he’s given Louis the ultimate gift: a way to opt out of racism and homophobia by checking out of society altogether. Louis can slaughter a man for making a racist comment, but he can’t overthrow an old boys’ club with the means and the connections to systematically bankrupt Black entrepreneurs like himself. In its most compelling moments, “Interview” explores which powers a Black vampire can or cannot wield in a segregated America.

But it takes the Frenchman a long while to realize what his lover understands intuitively: not even immortality supersedes race. Lestat (Sam Reid), a relatively enlightened émigré from France, fumes at Louis’s social condition: “This primitive country has picked you clean!” In a swoon of infatuation and white saviorism, he turns Louis into a vampire, believing that this will empower his companion.

Its greater sin, perhaps, is its near-incoherent plot-ironically, owing to the screenplay written by Rice.) The show’s reimagined Louis (Jacob Anderson) is an urban striver, surrounded by possibility yet stifled at every turn. (The director Neil Jordan’s shoddy 1994 film adaptation, which starred Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as Louis and Lestat, respectively, has been accused of blanching the story of its homoerotic subtext. The series, set in a gleamingly re-created New Orleans in the nineteen-tens and in the mid-pandemic present, makes the mysterious, mesmeric relationship between Louis and Lestat overtly queer. In the novel, which begins in the eighteenth century, Louis is a white Louisiana plantation owner who is turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt, a manipulative opportunist to whom the “fledgling” nonetheless feels a draw that he cannot explain. venture by taking lavish and clever liberties with the source text, the series may well surpass Rice’s vision in resonance and complexity. (AMC plans to develop several more, including “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches,” set to début in January.) “Interview” marks an auspicious start to this I.P. A lustily unfaithful adaptation of Rice’s 1976 novel of the same name, the historical fantasy drama is the first television series based on the author’s work. That’s the irresistible promise made to Louis de Pointe du Lac, a Black business owner and a closeted gay man living in the Jim Crow South, in “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire,” on AMC.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice