So, AMC’s “Immortal Universe”, based on Anne Rice’s enormously popular Vampire Chronicles and its sister series, the conspicuously less popular Lives of the Mayfair Witches, is going ahead. Good on them, they’ve cleared a big hurdle in actually putting out a second instalment in their shared universe.
Ever since Marvel characters from 2008’s Iron Man showed up in The Incredible Hulk (also 2008), it hasn’t been enough to simply make a series of films or even, God forbid, a standalone; everything these days has to be introducing us to some kind of shared universe no matter how dubious the groundwork for such a universe is. The concept isn’t actually anything new – the Universal horrors of the 30s and 40s crossed over Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man and Dracula with Abbott and Costello, The Mummy and The Invisible Man, while in Japan, Toho’s 50s and 60s output created their own mythological heroes out of Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and such other, less fondly remembered beasties as Varan the Unbelievable, while folding in King Kong and a kaiju-sized Frankenstein Monster too for good measure. One-offs like Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator have appeared intermittently over the years, while auteurish filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Todd Solondz have more quietly crossed over characters from one film into another – how many people even realise that Spy Kids and Machete share a setting? – and on the television, crossovers have long been commonplace, not mentioning sprawling, purpose-built alternate universe like those of CSI or Law & Order.
But nowadays such patchwork, incidental universe-building will not do, and you have to announce upfront that you’re launching a new Cinematic Universe!! It doesn’t matter whether your source material is 80+ years of comics with thousands of individual characters, or something as threadbare as the “case files” of a pair of fraud ghost hunters (The Conjuring Universe). This can be embarrassing when you only end up with a stillborn, one-entry “universe” like those of Green Lantern, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Ghostbusters 2016 or Universal’s Dark Universe which failed not once but twice (Dracula Untold, The Mummy) in resurrecting the original shared cinematic universe. So these Immortals are doing alright, with second seasons for both Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches already confirmed.
Interview was an enjoyable enough show, best enjoyed by not having read the book or seen the 1994 film. Mayfair Witches is an odd counterpart to it, much more ambitious yet somehow managing to feel much smaller. We follow Rowan (Alexandra Daddario) as she discovers her entertainingly X-Men-ish ability to look inside people and give them aneurysms, or whatever she wants. She’s unknowingly been using it for ages in her career as an inexplicably briliiant surgeon – now she knows why she’s so good, and also that she’s in a lot of trouble with various parties interested in her witchy bloodline. So naturally, she teams up with the absurdly-named detective Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa), who, how’s this for an X-Men power, has to wear gloves all the time because handling an object, any object, sees his brain overwhelmed with information about that object. You’d think this would lead to him constantly reliving the history of his own gloves, and maybe he is; if so, he doesn’t talk about it much.
Anyway, this is the basic plot, and it’s actually a lot more basic than it all feels. This is because the show jumps across three hundred years and four thousand miles, the Scottish borders in the 18th Century to New Orleans today, and points in-between, without doing much to really let you know what’s happening, when, and why. You’ll probably have reached the fifth, and best, episode before you really feel at home in the show, and by then you’re practically at the end, and 5 is the only episode that tells a story with any kind of breathing room to it. It also happens to be the only (mostly) standalone story in the season. This sort of storytelling may well work in the books (or it may not – I haven’t read them), but the constraints of television storytelling demands a different approach, especially when there are only eight episodes to play with.
And as I said, the real plot, when we get down to it, is surprisingly simple – simplistic, even. We have a likeable if bland lead in Daddario, a small group of other witches with very blue eyes, and a late-arriving group of bad guys who never do all that much to establish their threat. We know that they’re the bad guys because they dress like Proud Boys militia and look as though they smell bad. They’re bigoted against witches, which is a well-worn trope, except – to go back to X-Men for a moment – their bigotry really isn’t the same as hating immigrants, or trans people, or whatever, because immigrants and trans people don’t blow you up with your brains. At least in X-Men, while the supposed bigots are absolutely right that people who might fry you with laser beams if they lose concentration are dangerous, you still feel for the mutants, because they never asked for these powers and most of them seem to make day-to-day life much harder for them than it ought to be. Our heroic witches, on the other hand, choose to do spells and whatnot when they could just as easily, you know, not do that. We don’t even see them using magic for any kind of straightforwardly good purpose. I’m not sure how the series is supposed to pan out, but when you’re invoking demons by name I begin to side with the bigots; please, don’t invoke demons. Have you ever seen it end well? When you want to have witches as the good guys, your Harry Potters and Sabrinas and what have you, you generally have magic just be something that exists, like consciousness or time or love or all those other mysteries, not something that comes from Satan himself.
And, where Interview with the Vampire, in any medium, does a good job showing us the seductive power of vampirism – even though you know, deep down, it’s never a good thing – there doesn’t seem to be much of an upside to being a witch. It seems rather dull, frankly, which is how Mayfair Witches unfortunately pans out.
★★☆☆☆