Much like the way in which the Vampire Lestat was stirred from his eternal slumber by the propulsive sounds of rock and roll, so too have I been awoken from a two-year recap hiatus, bleary-eyed and holding a coffee mug that says “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my blood of Akasha,” by a new season of Interview With the Vampire. Or is it the first season of The Vampire Lestat? This show is something new altogether, with an entirely different feel from the first two seasons, but it is also dense with self-references, callbacks, and call-forwards, and it would be impossible to parse without having seen the first two seasons and studied for a Ph.D. in Lestatology. But I trust that this recap comments section, as it was in 2024, will be a symposium among true scholars.

Let it be known that I watched this episode for the first time on May 13, 2026. Let it be known that I wrote in my notes, verbatim, “It is going to take me four hours to get through each episode at the rate I have to pause, process, and do laps around my living room.” Let it be known that, in an interview published with my colleague Roxana Hadadi on June 2, 2026, Sam Reid said that while reading the script for this season, “He threw his laptop, took a walk around the building, came back in, finished reading the script, and had a 180-degree reaction.” The parallels are striking, so therefore let it be known that The Vampire Lestat is working exactly as intended, even if I haven’t personally yet reached that 180-degree reaction point. I am exhausted, disgusted, titillated, scoffing, giddy, and cringing at episode one, “Detroit,” but this is part of Rolin Jones’s grand plan, and we must trust the process.

This show already has me back in its death grip from its opening images, echoing the stark, concrete elegance of Armand and Louis’s Dubai penthouse — our “home base” for the first two seasons that was destroyed in the finale — only now we are in an off-grid airplane hangar, where a shadowy group of invited global elites has assembled for a posthumous auction of Lestat’s earthly possessions. Among them: the Right Honourable Raglan James (Justin Kirk in glasses), a random cardinal who never made it past the primary voting round of Conclave, and Armand (Assad Zaman), wearing an eyepatch. Already, attention must be paid, and italics must be used, because eyepatch Armand is, to use his favorite word, fascinating. He looks like a Yu-Gi-Oh villain. What happened to him? And why is Louis (Jacob Anderson) walking in with a cane? The auctioneer gets lots (auction pun intended) of exposition out as he reads the descriptions of what’s up for grabs. First is the masters, bonus recordings, and notes for his 2025 self-titled album, The Vampire Lestat, plus a “song cycle in the classic vein set to the poetry of Baudelaire.” The auctioneer, per instruction, lights the whole lot on fire, as though Lestat is saying fuck your physical media from beyond the grave. Drama queen.

Second on the docket, a Meccani sideboard containing, along with a magnum of his own blood, “111 albums of audio best described as an omniscient history of the events of the 2025 album, its supporting tour, and the consequential global catastrophes that sprung from said album as narrated by the Vampire Lestat himself.” Not even four minutes into the season (including the theme song), and already we’re learning that Lestat is dead and famous, and he’s caused some sort of global catastrophe with his musical side gig. The bidding starts at 50 million yuan, and the 111 record collection, titled “The Failures,” starts with …

The albums, narrated by Lestat, are the framework for this season, the way that the titular interview between Louis and Daniel (Eric Bogosian) was in seasons past. This show has, from the very beginning, toyed with Hamiltonian themes of who lives, who dies, and who tells your story, and this season, an ostensibly “dead” Lestat (I don’t believe him for a second) gets to take his own spin out for a spin. If Louis’s self-mythology took the form of a prestige-TV period piece, then Lestat’s takes the form of some truly experimental, gonzo TV storytelling. Lestat’s narration bounces around out of time and from one topic to the next; he is prone to monologues that sound like bad beat poetry, and his heady mix of self-aggrandizement and live-wire emotional vulnerability makes him as unreliable and fascinating (sorry, putting a dollar in Armand’s swear jar) a narrator as any we’ve seen on the show to this point. In it, we learn that sometime between the season-two finale and now, there has been “the attempted extinction of the Y chromosome across the continents,” but it wasn’t all Lestat’s fault.

His narration takes us from the auction, where Louis and Armand are a flurry of paddles in a vigorous bidding war, to onstage in 2025, where Rock Star Lestat and his eponymous backing band are playing his single “Long Face” for a crowd of his fans, whom he has christened “the beautiful unwell,” who “came for cosplay, left converted,” and if that doesn’t describe IWTV fandom, I’m not sure what does. He’s wearing a Dracula cape and Edward Cullen body glitter, and in voice-over, he introduces his bandmates: the boyfriend from Schitt’s Creek, his more talented straight-edge brother, a bassist called Salamander, and a girl drummer. He drones on about how his band is “already resting on the Alps of Adequacy,” but, of course, he’s loving all the attention and crowd-surfing, because for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, we see what I think is meant to be a blood-cum stain on his pants at the end of the number. This will not be the last red-tinted vampire bodily fluid we’ll see this episode.

Backstage, Lestat’s “Failures” narration is accompanied by tour-doc visuals, courtesy of the Vampire Daniel Molloy, filming a follow-up to his best seller Interview With the Vampire. We learn that Lestat’s Lestans think the book and the band are metafiction and that Lestat is just a human pretending to be Molloy’s beloved fictional character, a belief that echoes my more conspiratorial thinking about how there’s no way Sam Reid is an Australian actor and not actually Anne Rice’s Brat Prince made flesh. It’s a level of delusion that the show pokes fun at by introducing a Lestat body double, whose name I cannot pronounce, let alone spell, who is used to divert public attention away from the real Lestat as he fucks and kills his way through 52 tour stops in the Great Lakes and Northeast. This information is imparted via voice-over at un kilometre a minute, and it’s a lot to take in, especially as Lestat’s recording is fighting with Lestat hamming it up for the doc cameras, whipping his sweaty hair all over the lens and saying stupid-funny shit like “I’m going to my vampire dressing room now.” The sequence is part Her Smell, part Hedwig, all Lestat.

On Lestat’s vampire tour bus, we get our first taste of Vampire Daniel, sucking on a hookah (the suitably old-man version of an Elf Bar) and back in Pulitzer Prize–winning interviewer mode, which Lestat treats with great flippancy and annoyance, despite Daniel saying that Lestat is the one who requested him to make the tour doc. Daniel asks Lestat about why he formed a band, why he plays music “no one wants to hear” to small rooms, and why now. Lestat lays down word salad about how human lives have never mattered less, and “no more safe spaces,” and denies the lies and aspersions Louis said about him in that accursed book.

Flash back to the night Lestat formed his band, which was also the night he learned about the existence of Interview With the Vampire the book, now published and a pop-culture sensation. Lestat has been living in relative normalcy in a gorgeous apartment that, considering it’s in Montreal, probably costs under $2,000 CAD a month. He seems subdued, stable, FaceTiming with Louis like the iPad bébé he is until he sees a headline about Molloy’s salacious vampire tell-all, causing him to stomp on down to the bookstore and crash out at a couple of blasé Quebecois clerks. He scours the book, muttering to himself and scribbling all over and ripping out pages, until the awful cacophony of the band across the street, mixed with fury over Louis’s slander and confusion at the trick-or-treating kids dressed like “characters” from the book appearing on his doorstep as though to haunt him like diminutive ghosts of his past, makes him snap. He storms across the street up to the band in the attic, angrily plays a guitar riff at them, and snaps their guitar in half. This is how the obscure Canadian band Satan’s Night Out became the Vampire Lestat. This whole sequence is absolutely the highlight of the episode for me: I like the pacing, and the humor, and the way Reid plays Lestat’s agitation to remarkable, surprising comedic effect. I like getting a lived-in glimpse of what his relationship with Louis looks like in the 2020s, and I adore watching him interact with the modern human world: Why is the Vampire Lestat even giving out candy to trick-or-treaters to begin with? Delightful! The best thing about this sequence is that it shows rather than tells, taking its foot off the voice-over accelerator for a few minutes and allowing a scene to play out for itself, letting the emotions on Reid’s face do all the talking.

Back on tour, Lestat is staying in a vampire-themed hotel in Detroit called Dracula’s Daughter. Everywhere he goes, there’s a vampire hit out on his head: “The brat sings, the brat dies. The Great Laws are clear,” they say in their telepathic group chat. “If he comes to your town, kill him.” The pressure is getting to him, so he texts his estranged lover, “I miss you. Come to me.” He types out, “I need you. I’m struggling,” and then deletes before sending. The lover might be Louis, but the names in the chat are mysteriously labeled “Moi” and “Toi,” like chic French Jane and Lily, so we can’t know for certain. At his Detroit gig, he shreds on an electric violin while two vamps in the audience heckle him telepathically. We learn they are “regional” vamps (Lestat says “regional” with the derisive edge of a Twitter gay texting that video of Lady Gaga saying, “I am honored to be in the presence of so many locals”) who are absolutely going to try to kill him later. As he fiddles away furiously and they stare stakes at him, he gets caught up in a blur of frustrating and traumatizing memories and, in front of the crowd, bites and drinks from the first fangirl who climbs up onstage.

She had taken LSD and MDMA, so Lestat immediately starts tripping backstage while Daniel & Co. try to revive her. He has a vision of her soul floating above him, prophesizing everyone’s death (Daniel “dies bad”) and warning him that “they’re comin’” for him. He confesses that he wants “billions” of fans, even though she says that won’t break his centuries-long cycle of (Charli voice) falling in love again and again.

Cut to Lestat’s head in a toilet bowl in a motel bathroom with blood spewed all over the walls. Then freeze-frame, record-scratch, “you’re probably wondering how I ended up here”–type backtracking on the part of Lestat’s narration. We see that, after the groupie was revived via blood transfusion, she came out partying with Lestat at the Detroit hotel, and he is rolling off her molly-laced blood, because “I have a blind spot when it comes to blood poisoning” (cue flashbacks to his near deaths from past seasons). Reid plays this so well, but the direction is a little over the top, with drug-trip visuals that are too distracting to follow the dense-as-ever disjointed narration. Lestat has a threesome in the elevator on the way up to his suite, but when he gets out on the top floor, the regional vamps — called the “Fang Gang” — are lining the hallway, all trying to kill him. It looks like a yakuza action scene, as Lestat single-handedly claws and kills one henchman after another, with Daniel and the playwright vamp Sam (now moonlighting as a vampire DJ) eventually popping out of the elevator for backup. The Fang Gang (God, it’s soooo Scott Pilgrim) say they honor the laws of the Children of Satan, which is all too triggering for Lestat, who just wants to live loud and proud and be unburdened by his demons. The fight makes its way to the penthouse, exposing Lestat as a real live vampire to his bandmates, who, up until now, thought the vampire thing was an elaborate bit. Bloody and beaten, he yeets himself out the hotel window and flies off to the motel room where he puked blood and is down bad, until the mystery “Toi” appears at his door.

This is another moment for an excellent performance by Reid, looking truly monstrous and pathetic with his face mangled, eyes blackened, and lip split, who, in a single frame, captures all of the love and need and sadness and desperation and pathetic humor of the character, at his lowest and desperate to be taken care of. “Mon cher,” he says, and then we get the ultimate fake-out and big bomb of the season: That’s not Louis he’s been texting. It’s his damn mother, the Vampire Gabriella. She mends a wound on his face with a caressing hand, and then the two make out, intensely, on the cheap hotel bed.

This show remains for the crazies, by the crazies, and I am so happy it’s back.

• We need to talk about the blood piss. I did not need to know about the blood piss. I did not need a whole scene of explanation where Lestat goes, “Oh, and of course Louis didn’t tell you about the blood piss. This isn’t your mama’s season of Interview With the Vampire. On this season, vampires piss blood.” I think it would have been a funny gag to see (see also: that little spot of blood-cum), but the expounding on the mechanics of the pissing of the blood was one of a few moments where it felt like the episode had really overindulged. I don’t want this show to be What We Do in the Shadows. 

• Speaking of the delicate balance between camp sublime and cringe, this is a music-heavy season with lyrics that are very on the nose, as Lestat says his songs tell his story. They risk falling into the corny trap that often befalls the sort of “punk rock” you hear in certain musicals, but it’s all buoyed by composer Daniel Hart’s catchy, clever pastiche and Reid’s totally committed, entrancing glam-rock performance.

• I didn’t love the whole “Did you stutter as a child?” thing Daniel’s doing. It’s not the gotcha he thinks it is. In general, I found Daniel’s smarm much more tolerable when he was a weak and trembling human fearing death and find it far more annoying now that he’s just another vamp. Is this what Armand feels like all the time?

• Lestat is absolutely traumatized by “two years as Mr. Du Lac’s B-movie brute” in the book he calls “the editorial wags of an insane person.” Here are some things said or shown in the first two seasons and in Daniel’s book that Lestat insists are slanderous lies:

  • His hair back then was longer than depicted.
  • Louis didn’t include the scars on his chest.
  • He did not threaten Claudia with rape on a train.
  • He did not play Harlequin. He played Lelio. 

• Please, send your vampire armies after me in the comments.

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