My boyfriend Nico wrote a very long, detailed, review of The Vampire Lestat (2026), the third season of the AMC television. Not the book, as he's rather allergic to book reviews. Anyway, as a show of faith in his ability to write the riteous review of his dreams, I promised I would cross-post it here. An hour of CSS later, here we are! You can read 2,000 words about a racist television season here, or on his Letterboxd, where this review was originally posted.
Without further ado: the review!
"Oh how is it racist, what do you mean it's racist?"
FINE. OKAY. IT'S NOT MY FAULT YOU GUYS DON'T RECOGNIZE RACISM.
Okay, starting off: there are no Black writers in the writer's room for a show that has been about racism and been about a Black main character. Just because the main character is no longer Black and the show is set in the modern day does not mean you fire all your Black writers: the love interest is still Black, the daughter is still Black, and racism is still just as present in the modern day. And I'll get to this new shift to Lestat as the main character.
Starting smaller, with the first example, we have two new and original Black female characters in this season, neither of which come from the books: Dee Pharma and Regina doesn't-get-a-last-name. Both of these women are sexualized by the plot and their circumstances. Dee wanders around the tour bus naked, she gets fucked in an elevator, she exists for Lestat to get high off of. There's no critique with the treatment of Dee at all, you don't get a parallel to Lestat's treatment and use of Miss Lilly, you don't get a critique of how Lestat has fetishized Black characters under the guise of equality since season one. After she's filled her drugs and sex purpose, Dee basically disappears. And Regina? Regina canonically is a sex worker, despite the fact we don't need that to be part of her backstory at all. "But," you might say, "the comparison to Louis being a pimp!" We'll get to that. Trust me. She's also canonically a criminal, doing credit card fraud. They took a new and original Black female character and chose to make her a sex worker and a criminal, two stereotypes of Black people, and it is not examined as something people are driven to by desperation at all. And I'll talk more about Regina as this review goes on.
That's the more subtle, structural racism. I want to talk about the incredibly racist lines throughout this season. And again, yes, there are reasons that characters might say racist things. Both Lestat and Daniel are supposed to be characters with unexamined biases who show those things through the writing, which we see a lot in the first two seasons. So I really don't want to hear anything about that. Because if it's a critique of their racism, why on earth does it sound the same? Daniel's racism and homophobia, coming from the 70s and 80s, would sound completely different from Lestat's racism that comes from the 1700s. And still, they both crack the same jokes, which shows me that it was less intentional and more that the writer's room was laughing too. To have a Black character called "Louisiana Fried Chicken" is so incredibly racist. To have a Brown character's sexual abuse mocked is also racist, and if they actually meant it as a critique of Lestat (which, again, I will get to that), they wouldn't be posting it with twirly text on Instagram. This is different than the establishing lines of "chocolate and cinnamon", "rent boy", "shah rukh khan". These function as the same comedic lines as the (out of place and obnoxious) pop culture references.
And if we're talking about racism, we need to talk about the seance scene. First of all, this is not at all like the seance from Merrick. Second of all, the choice to have Nicki more prominently haunting Lestat than Claudia, when Claudia is haunting Lestat in the books, is a disgusting pushing aside of a Black woman for a white man, and they frankly don't even give that white man his due as a character. But what specifically is racist about the seance scene? Well, first of all, the fact that Claudia calls Louis "nappy headed". Bear in mind that Lestat gets not half the verbal abuse that Louis does in this scene. It's is Louis who is called "nappy headed" by a writer's room full of white people. It is Louis who is told that being a slave is "enscribed on his ribcage". And yes, Claudia calls Louis a slave in the first season. But first of all, that is taken word for word from the book. And secondly, she isn't saying he's inherently a slave, she is comparing Lestat to a slave master. Here, a Black man is told that he is inherently a slave no matter what. And Delainey herself said that she was uncomfortable about the scene!
And it's Louis and Jacob who gets the brunt of the racism this season. Jacob Anderson said in an interview that he was was promised he wouldn't have to get too bloody this season. Of course, he was made the bloodiest of all. Yes, we see both him and Lestat, beheaded, but this of the sheer difference in how their brutalized bodies are treated. Lestat's head is in a bag, we don't really see it at all. We only get a glimpse of Lestat's body. This is in comparison to overfocus on Louis' head and body, both bloody and torn up. Louis is suffering, unable to speak, crying. This is all done to him by a non-white, non-Black man. We'll get more to the non-white bit, but Louis is the only still living Black major character, and he is the only character brutalized like this. And while both he and Claudia were brutalized more often in previous seasons, it was their season. Now, that is recontextualized by the fact that white characters are not seen half as bloody and mangled as Black characters.
This all happens in a Kosher butcher shop (antisemitic), perpetrated by a Brown man, who is commonly seen as Muslim by the fanbase (racist, islamophobic), as well as another brown man. He is livestreaming this brutalization of a Black person to an audience. Having two brown characters inflict this violence also leads to the way that brown men are seen as uniquely violent and brutal. And here we see Regina again, and she is also denied any agency. Instead of doing anything by her own will, she was being manipulated by a brown man, so she had absolutely no control over her story. Now, she's reduced to another woman who exists just to further a man (Louis') emotional arc, instead of as an interesting character struggling with a stalker.
And then, Louis apologizes. He apologizes to a man who was his abuser (and I'm a huge Armand fan, he's my babygirl, but he was still an abuser) for the fact he was abused, because he is being painted as this big, bad, Black man. And while one might say, oh yes, he was forced, watsonian explainations galore, that does not erase the fact that Rolin Jones and Hannah Moscovitch both said that he owed this apology. Now, compare that to the glorification and the way Big Boss and the surrounding mocking of Armand's trauma is forgiven. A Black man cannot have a complicated relationship with his abuser, but a white man is allowed to mock the sexual abuse of a brown man. There is an implicit hierarchy here.
And, I just really want to give this it's own paragraph: Louis is branded. Armand brands Louis. If you cannot see the issue of branding a Black man with ownership, that is a you problem.
Speaking of Louis' so called "flaws", this season does not let him forget them. It feels a lot like they are mad he had to be the main character for so long. Louis is one hundred years old but he can never escape being a pimp, not even with his own guilt over this. I saw someone say that the word "pimp" started to sound like the N-word, and it really does. Louis is called a "pimp" in a derogatory manner over and over again. Lestat, a john, does not get this. Louis' flaws are a focus, while even as Lestat does crazy shit, his flaws never feel so focal.
And let's talk about the focus on Lestat. One of the things I've found myself saying over and over about this season is that if you choose to make your main characters Black or otherwise people of color, it's ridiculous to then regularly be racist towards them. They chose to make Louis Black, and yet are racist this season. They chose to cast a South Asian actor as Armand, and then leave him out of marketing and the season and erase his role from the books where he was beloved by both Lestat and Louis. But the inverse is also true. The first season was also made by these people. These people chose to make Lestat more abusive than in canon. They chose for him to drop Louis out of the sky, they chose for him to get Claudia off the train, they chose for him to regularly and consistently be portrayed as racist even if he did not know he was being racist. And in this season, they seem to want to either ignore it all or erase it.
This feels like DARVO the season. Instead of explaining Lestat's behavior, they keep excusing it. When I read TVL, I had a much better grasp on why he was so awful, which is what I wanted out of this season. TVL is basically a graph on how Lestat developed abandonment issues and BPD. Instead of giving us an explanation and trusting us to still watch the "complicated characters who suck" show, it feels like this season was so focused on defending Lestat from the things they made him do! They could have just not had him do any of that! The main thing that is important is the train scene. First of all, I don't know who watched that and thought he was threatening rape. He wasn't. He was threatening grievous bodily harm, which is totally in character. But to have a Black character who is a victim of abuse say she lied about her abuser is disgusting, especially because she is painted in the wrong. Personally, even if she did, which I can't fathom was something they were thinking about writing that scene, I would stand with her, because that's her abuser and you do what you need to escape abuse. But the show portrays her as in the wrong, as this being something that personally hurt Lestat, as if he didn't abuse her in a myriad of other ways. That's the main problem with this character switch, which did need to happen because that's how it happened in canon, but instead of explaining and exploring Lestat they decided to go full throttle into defending him in increasingly racist ways.
Louis is out of character. Armand is barely on screen. Daniel is racist. Lestat is racist. Armand is out of character. Dee exists to do drugs and have sex. Regina exists to be used by a man. Louis is called a nappy headed slave. Claudia attacks her Black parent and not her white parent. Louis is brutalized. Claudia is shown brutalized. Louis is branded with an initial. The white characters are barely shown hurt, the Black characters are completely fucked over. The writing room had no Black writers.
You can miss the racism in this season, just as you can miss the misogyny (and hoo boy, it might be just as long as this), but it's there, it's clear if you know how to spot it, and the writers are counting on you not spotting it or not calling it out. The next season is supposed to feature a Black woman as the villain, and I do not trust that. It is our duty to remind Hanna Moscovitch that we are watching, that we saw the racism this season, and that Black people need to return to the writer's room, actors of color need to be valued both as main cast members and as the powerhouses they are in the book, and that if they can't handle a story they chose to make racially diverse they need to give it to someone who can.
I think it's absolutely disgusting that a show that marketed itself as a show with Black vampires, an anti-racist show, a show that critiques racism decided to have such a voraciously racist third season.
And before anyone gets Watsonian, wah wah wah this is Lestat's perspective, I don't care. Louis' perspective was regularly questioned and critiqued. The fact the white man's narration doesn't get called into question is also racist.
Read Nico's other Letterboxd reviews | Read Nico's book reviews
