Since 2022, with the first seasons of both Dark Winds and Interview with the Vampire, AMC has proved itself unafraid to take risks at the intersection of horror and speculative fiction. This daring brought spectacular payoffs. Although the following year’s Mayfair Witches (the second title in the Immortal Universe franchise based on the works of Anne Rice) didn’t land with anywhere near the same immediacy, precision, or production value as Interview, AMC’s third IU venture, Talamasca: The Secret Order, has made a much stronger showing with its inaugural run of six episodes. It’s no Interview—in fact, no show on AMC is Interview, nor can any show really hope to be—but this supernatural spy thriller is better than Mayfair by far, and it’s a fun ride for both current IU fans and the uninitiated alike.
Drawn from the mythology of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches novels, the Talamasca is a secret organization that has so far also appeared in the television adaptations of both series. To work for this organization, one must be shaped for a role that sits at the crossroads of scholar and spy—and while mortals may indeed do so, the organization also occasionally employs witches and even vampires. The Talamasca’s role since its founding in AD 752 has been to keep an eye on ghosts, witches, vampires, and all manner of supernatural entities without directly interfering in their existence (their motto: “We watch, and we are always there”). Of course, this work is undertaken with varying degrees of success: Both the society’s ability and its desire to remain hands-off has deteriorated, as any viewer of Interview with the Vampire already knows from crucial events in its second season.
Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), a senior agent at the Talamasca’s New York “motherhouse,” recruits Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton), a hard-up young man fresh out of Yale Law School, to join her at the US headquarters of the society. Guy has possessed from birth the gift of being able to hear the thoughts of others, which has frequently made his life difficult as an orphaned child in foster care. He leans on medication to ameliorate its stress. Guy is initially unimpressed with Helen’s pitch aimed at convincing him to work for the Talamasca, but his subsequent visit to his foster mother uncovers a secret: The Talamasca not only placed him with her, but has had a hand in every area of his life, from the schools he has attended to his law-school admission and funding. On returning to New York, Guy gives Helen a second chance to convince him, at which point she introduces him to Burton (Jason Schwartzman), a vampire either under the protection of, or under house arrest by, the Talamasca, depending on one’s perspective. Burton’s role is to convince Guy that the supernatural is real. During the visit, Burton offers Guy a caveat: The Talamasca’s intentions are never what they seem, and they will use him.
In the process of reading a copy of a book by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) given to him by Burton (and familiar to fans of Interview), Guy comes across his biological mother’s name inexplicably included in a list that appears in the text. Guy confronts Daniel after one of his public reading events only to learn that Molloy is as angry and mystified by the appearance of the name as Guy. Daniel informs Guy that he isn’t responsible for that page, but that the Talamasca has inserted its contents. Because Guy has spent most of his life believing that his biological mother is dead, and he now knows that the Talamasca has some link to her, he decides to take Helen up on her offer of employment—which gets him immediately dispatched to London after his whirlwind training, where he is supposed to do his level best to discover the nature of some shady goings-on at the London motherhouse. He also quickly learns that he has been hired in the wake of a young London agent’s death, which for the viewer has already comprised the first episode’s memorably paranoid and grisly opening sequence. In it, Talamasca operative Soledad Marcel (Simona Brown) takes her own life rather than be consumed by a horde of mindless revenant vampires, but not before recovering and stashing a secret for another agent to recover. Regrettably, the payoff on that plot thread feels anticlimactic given how late-stage the recovery occurs. In light of that fact, killing off one of two Black women characters within the first few minutes seems in especially poor taste.
Throughout the six-episode run of the series, Guy faces a steep learning curve on his journey to becoming a secret agent with a supernatural difference. He meets with romance and heartbreak in dizzying succession. He meets another vampire, Jasper (William Fichtner), who acts as antagonist to Guy’s hero and is perhaps the single most compelling reason to watch the series. Fichtner seems delighted to have finally broken free of past side-man typecasting, bringing whimsy underpinned with a startling depth of bitterness to the vampire’s actions. Both Jasper and Guy are furious, searching for answers regarding why the Talamasca has historically done what it has done—and continues to do what it does. The pair grow fascinated with each other and make for an unlikely, yet shockingly effective, team. And while Guy’s backstory certainly embodies the definition of tragic, it is Jasper’s backstory that will truly haunt audiences until well after the curtain falls on the sixth episode. Talamasca weaponizes the histories and fates of its vampire characters nearly as successfully as Interview does, just on a smaller scale. While there was speculation as early as the first announcement of Fichtner’s and Schwartzman’s casting as Jasper and Burton that these vampires might prove to be book characters in disguise (similar to the gambit so masterfully executed by Interview, with Assad Zaman’s “Fake Rashid” turning out to be none other than the Vampire Armand), these vampires are Talamasca inventions—and, as such, start their existences with far higher stakes in the grand scheme of IU vampiredom. That makes them, and their stories, far more meaningful than any retread of material from the books. That’s best left to Interview.
Several women among the cast of characters—Elizabeth McGovern as Helen, Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Olive, and Céline Buckens as Doris—also give standout performances. Helen and Olive, as Guy’s Talamasca mentor and handler respectively, are constantly hiding more from him than they’re telling him; it is always a distinct pleasure to watch female characters get to be deceptive, and powerfully so. Guy constantly calls them out, but there’s not much more he can do until late in the game. Meanwhile, Guy meets Doris among a coven of witches entangled in the Talamasca’s drama—and her role in his fraught experiences in London is second only to Jasper’s and Helen's.
Pacing-wise, Talamasca leaves something to be desired in the season’s first half. Its first three episodes take far too long to lay out the show’s exposition; subsequently, the final three episodes unspool events so fast as to give the viewer whiplash. However, its production values fall somewhere between Mayfair and Interview, so this quirky horror-thriller with a side of romance is worth at least one watch for the casual viewer. For fans of AMC’s IU, it’s worth several, especially for cameos by characters they will recognize from elsewhere in the franchise and for lore-expansion on the show version of the Talamasca. Notably, the most significant departure from the novels occurs in the Order’s actions and motivations: This is an incredibly insidious organization compared to its literary counterpart. They are more spies than scholars, and they have been doing more than just watching the creatures they claim to keep an eye on in the name of “balance” between the natural and supernatural. Consider what they’re doing to Burton and a few other vampires, for example, to the tune of blackmail and worse, as several flashbacks reveal.
In season two of Interview, Raglan James claims to Daniel Molloy that the Order isn’t that well funded. This show reveals this to be, in a word, bullshit. Throughout history, they’ve been seizing the assets of much longer-lived entities than themselves, using the deadliest leverage of all: Information. Fortunately for the viewer of this show—but unfortunately for its characters—the Talamasca has never been more sinister.