Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully. It is, in some ways, an extremely faithful adaptation. Showrunner Rolin Jones and his team have spoken about the novel and its sequels with great fondness, and their version takes care to preserve whole stretches of dialogue, or to remember that a certain character went to her death wearing a yellow dress. The two seasons that have aired follow the novel’s plot almost to the letter. Yet, within the confines of that faithfulness, this version of Interview with the Vampire also plays elaborate games with its source material. Without changing the story in its essence, and without running away from its cheesiness, it produces something that is at once a retelling, an updating, and a sequel to the original.

Interview with the Vampire is the story of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, who reveals to an unnamed journalist how, as a young plantation owner in eighteenth-century New Orleans, he was “turned” by the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. In novel’s first half, adapted in the show’s first season, Louis proves unhappy in their partnership, so Lestat turns a young girl, Claudia, to act as a surrogate daughter for the couple, despite knowing that she will mature mentally and emotionally while her body remains eternally childlike. Frustrated by Lestat’s mercurial temper and his secrecy over the history and nature of vampirism, Claudia and Louis turn on him. The second season adapts the book’s second half, in which Claudia and Louis run away to Paris, where they meet the vampire Armand and his coven-cum-theatrical troupe. But, when the coven learn of Claudia and Louis’s betrayal of Lestat, they attack them, leaving Claudia dead, and Louis uncertain whether Armand, who is now his companion, played a role in her death. As the interview ends, the journalist begs to be turned into a vampire, to which Louis, who views his condition as a curse, reacts in disgust, attacking and nearly killing the other man.

The new Interview with the Vampire preserves the novel’s fevered, melodramatic tone. As Lestat, Sam Reid struts across the screen, equal parts seductive and psychopathic, punching his fist through a priest’s head one moment, confessing his love to Louis the next, and then turning him into a vampire on a blood-soaked church altar (he is also often extremely funny, with much of the show’s humor derived from the moments when Lestat proves unexpectedly self-aware). He and Jacob Anderson’s Louis trade overwrought dialogue (“You took my life!” Louis spits at Lestat during a fight) and equally overwrought actions (seeking to prevent Louis’s leaving him, Lestat floats them both kilometers into the air and lets go), enthusiastically chewing the scenery in lengthy monologues. At the same time, the show makes some decisive adaptation choices to make the story its own. The story’s timeline has been moved forward, with Louis’s narrative spanning the first half of the twentieth century rather than the whole of the nineteenth. Louis, Claudia, and Armand are all played by actors of color. Perhaps most obviously, the subtextual queerness of the eternal companion bond is brought to the surface.

To a one, these are smart choices, especially when coupled with the show’s sharp writing and impeccable performances. Beyond just avoiding some of the novel’s more problematic elements—making Louis gay, for example, obviates the queasily romantic charge of his relationship with Claudia—they add immediacy and urgency to Rice’s story, creating the impression that we are the ones being told a twisty, salacious, roundabout tale. The more modern setting grounds the story in the familiar, and creates unexpected resonances, as when Louis and Claudia’s sojourn in Europe brackets the second world war, or when Claudia befriends Madeleine (Roxane Duran), a Parisian woman ostracized by her neighbors for having a relationship with a Nazi soldier—the isolation of which makes her susceptible to the allure of vampirism.

Making Louis a Black man in 1910 obviously avoids the problem that, in the book, he is a slave owner who permits Lestat to feed on his slaves. But it also creates new sources of tension. Descended from a well-off Creole family whose wealth he maintains by running brothels on the black side of town, Louis is a big man in his own community, while constantly effacing himself before the white businessmen whose world he wants to enter. That isolation is only exacerbated by Louis’s gayness, which allows Lestat to offer him something real while demanding everything in return. When Louis’s family turn their back on him, it’s not entirely clear whether the cause is their sense that he has become inhuman, or their shock that he is living openly with a man.

At the same time, these are also predictable choices, par for the course for a modern streaming adaptation of an older work. What’s most interesting and unexpected about the way Interview with the Vampire chooses to adapt its story is that it starts from the premise that the interview described in the book has already happened. In 1973, a drug-addicted hustler and wannabe journalist named Daniel Molloy (Luke Brandon Field) interviewed a man claiming to be a vampire and barely escaped with his life. Forty-nine years later, in 2022, Molloy (Eric Bogosian), now at the tail end of a storied journalism career, receives a box containing the tapes of this long-ago interview, along with an invitation. In a luxuriously appointed penthouse in Dubai, he reunites with Louis to record what the other man claims is the full, true story.

The conceit of the second interview allows Interview with the Vampire to offer fascinating riffs on the notion of faithfulness to its source material. The very premise of the show is that the novel is a flawed version of the story it’s telling. Like Molloy, we in the audience seem to have been expected to already know the rough outlines of the story—details such as Claudia’s impending death, or the fact that Louis and Armand became a couple, are revealed long before they occur in Louis’s narrative. What we’re being offered instead—in what feels almost like a metafictional mission statement for the show—is a deeper, more complex, more truthful version of the story.

Or perhaps that should read emotionally truthful, because one of the first things Interview with the Vampire does is remind us of its own artificiality. This is, after all, a story about a person telling a story, which is a second version of a story they have already told. Early in the second interview, Molloy points out that Louis’s present-day descriptions of Lestat as an urbane, sensitive polymath clash with his statements from 1973, in which he described him—in what are often direct quotes from the novel—as a boor and a poseur (this is also consistent with the novel’s sequels, in which Lestat is made more magnetic and compelling). Louis merely shrugs: “the tapes are an admitted performance.” Louis, as we have seen by this point, is a gifted performer—as a young human in New Orleans, he is adept at wearing different faces to suit different people. So the question is obviously raised: can we trust this interview any more than we could the previous one?

Often, the answer is that we can’t. In the second season’s standout episode, Louis and Molloy realize that their memories of the first interview have been doctored, and try to puzzle out what actually happened; the season’s climax comes when Molloy finally wrangles from the myriad conflicting stories that have been told about it the truth of who bears responsibility for Claudia’s death. Much of the pleasure of watching Interview with the Vampire over time lies in untangling the various lies, half-truths, and misrepresentations that the interview keeps throwing up.

Louis claims to be offering the unvarnished truth, but is constantly brought up short by misremembered events. Claudia is supposedly the most unmediated figure in the narrative, her voice coming to us through diaries which Louis preserves like museum artifacts. But eventually it’s revealed that she failed to understand some of the most important events in her life. When Molloy—whom old age has made grumpier but also gifted with a keen nose for bullshit—first meets Armand (Assad Zaman), he is pretending to be Louis’s human servant, a performance he commits to with gusto, but also with no apparent aim. Various key moments are shown to us from multiple perspectives, which often changes their significance, while others—such as Armand recounting his first meeting with Lestat in eighteenth-century Paris—are so implausible and full of holes that it seems certain we will learn more about them in the future (the already greenlit third season will adapt the novel The Vampire Lestat [1985], which is told from Lestat’s perspective).

Other times, the show argues that truth can be arrived at through performance: when Louis and Claudia attend a performance of Armand’s theatrical troupe, the actors “pretend” to be vampires and consume a victim onstage, to the human audience’s delight. Theatrical flourishes abound throughout the show, from the opening title music (the sound of an orchestra tuning its instruments that builds to a scream-like crescendo) to a title card at the beginning of the second season announcing, after original performer Bailey Bass was forced to drop out due to scheduling issues, that “the role of Claudia will now be played by Delainey Hayles.” (It is unsurprising to learn that Jones and several members of his writing room have a background in theater.) The coven’s attack on Louis, Claudia, and Madeleine also takes the form of a play, an on-stage “trial” in which Lestat acts as the chief accuser. But in the midst of this fully scripted narrative—the “verdict” of which has already been decided upon—some unexpected truths are revealed, and some painful and long overdue admissions are made.

In all the fun of puzzling out these metafictional games, it can be easy to miss one simple truth, the most fundamental way in which James and his team both honor and upend their source material: this show about vampires is not about vampires. It’s about partnership. Like so much else about the show, this is something that only becomes clear as the multitude of conflicting narratives assert themselves. To begin with, Louis and Lestat’s problems seem firmly rooted in their vampiric nature. Louis broods about his growing alienation from his family, and recoils in disgust from Lestat’s demand that he hunt and kill humans. Lestat, with increasing annoyance, explains that Louis’s continued involvement in human affairs is a lingering affectation that he will soon outgrow, and grouses that his companion doesn’t value the gift of eternal life. It’s Molloy, with typical succinctness, who cuts through the supposed fantastical specificity of the couple’s problems and identifies the more universal dysfunction at their root, describing Claudia, for example, as “a Band-Aid on a shitty marriage.”

That subtext existed already in the original book, but the show not only brings it to the surface but eventually dispenses with the vampiric trappings in discussions of it. When Lestat, after allowing him to plummet to the ground, convinces Louis to rekindle their relationship by dangling a current lover in front of him, it hardly matters that the context for their breakup was a supernatural attack; it’s the unhealthy dynamic that registers. In 2022, Louis and Armand swan around their Dubai penthouse like any uber-rich couple who have been together too long and are trying to paper over the death of their relationship with art collection and elaborate home renovation projects. They give sickly sweet performances to Molloy, finishing each other’s sentences as they reminisce about their meeting and courtship (Louis recalls that Armand’s first words to him were “I will not harm you”; “And I never did,” Armand adds, like a liar). In private, they bicker passive-aggressively over how to redecorate the den. When we flash back to 1973, they are doing their best George and Martha impressions, throwing long-simmering accusations at each other (Armand worries that Louis is still hung up on his ex; Louis is just bored).

All of which raises the question: what is this interview for? In the novel, it was a way of introducing the vampire lifestyle, and Rice’s unique take on the concept. The show, having downplayed that aspect of the story in favor of more mundane relationship drama, leaves space for us to wonder why Louis even wants to tell his story. In 1973, Armand suggests that the interview is a way of luring Lestat back into Louis’s life. In 2022, he warns that if Molloy publishes the book he is planning to write, other vampires will learn that Louis has spilled all their secrets, and rush to attack him. Is the whole exercise, he wonders, just an elaborate suicide attempt? At other points, it doesn’t even seem that elaborate. Perhaps Louis is simply laying out his last will and testament before he checks himself out in a less roundabout fashion.

What eventually becomes clear is that this is all about Claudia. This, too, is a way in which the show keeps to the letter of Rice’s novel while going deeper into its ideas. In the novel, Claudia is an inherently tragic figure. Made wrong, she exudes wrongness by expressing adult emotions—and especially, adult sexual desire—in the body of a child. Her death can’t help but come as something of a relief. It resolves a problem that ultimately had no good solution, in a way that leaves Louis’s hands relatively clean, and which allows him to further brood and wallow in self-pity. The show, in contrast, keeps revealing that Claudia’s tragedy is the product of choice. Not merely the choice to make her—which is here shown to be a supremely selfish one for which neither Louis nor Lestat can disclaim responsibility—but the choice of how to raise her. Louis dotes on her, but can’t deal with the difficulties she experiences as she grows up. Lestat finds a kindred spirit in her—it is one of the story’s ironies that the two of them have more in common with each other than either of them does with Louis—but when her troubles start, he draws back, retreating into the excuse that she is inherently flawed. Neither one of her parents is capable of placing her above their desire for each other. If Claudia is a child made to fix a marriage, her fathers always turn out to be more invested in that marriage than in her.

In the second season, Claudia does what a lot of children of neglectful, abusive parents do, and starts raising herself. She seeks out other vampires, hoping to form healthier relationships with them. She tries to define herself away from Louis’s interests and relationships, becoming entranced by the theater’s productions and joining its troupe. She meets Madeleine, and forges a friendship with her based in honesty and mutual appreciation—it is particularly touching to observe how cautiously, and with how many opportunities to turn back, Madeleine is brought to choose vampirism, in stark contrast to the manipulation and coercion in which not just Louis’s, but Lestat’s and Armand’s, vampire origins are rooted. There’s a hopefulness to the new beginning Claudia forges with Madeleine that makes it all the more heartbreaking when it’s denied to her, by the very people she’d hoped would be her new family. And, as the show is at pains to point out, both of her parents bear no small amount of responsibility for this tragedy: Louis is too consumed with his new romance with Armand, and too tired of Claudia’s needs and demands, while Lestat realizes too late that Claudia was his daughter and had a claim on him.

The show thus achieves a miraculous alchemy. It makes Claudia’s death a tragedy that is distinct from the feelings the men in her life have about it. And it makes it clear how shattered both Louis and Lestat still are by it, and by the role they played in it, even seventy years later. This, then, is the final transformation Interview with the Vampire performs on its original material. The tragedy of vampirism becomes the tragedy of living with your worst mistakes. Eternal life is a curse because you might find yourself trapped in a bad marriage; because it forces you to live with the knowledge of having failed the people you loved. Yet, in the midst of all this guilt and self-loathing, the show also holds out the hope that, by telling their stories with honesty, its characters can finally move forward. In 1973, Louis and Molloy help each other keep going. In 2022, Molloy cuts through the morass of lies that have been holding Louis in stasis. And in the second season’s final scene, Louis and Lestat offer each other some kindness. The one blessing of immortality, the show seems to be saying, is that it offers the possibility of forgiving, and of discovering the ability to move on.