Related Articles
When a new episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired the Sunday before last, a particular sort of fuse was lit in online conversations around the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape,” was an impeccably written and acted horror film in miniature—the sort of thing you watch with your mouth hanging open, before pointing at your TV and saying, “Are you seeing this, too?!?!”
Yet when thousands took to social media to ask that very question, much of the commentary was underscored by confusion, even concern, that people were, in fact, not seeing it, too—that they weren’t seeing Interview With the Vampire at all. For a show so good, many said, it was criminal that more people weren’t watching and discussing it, and that more critics weren’t covering it. “This is the best show on TV right now,” New York Times culture reporter Kyle Buchanan wrote in one widely shared tweet. “I feel gaslit that you’d all rather talk about mid or bad shows rather than watch the golden standard!”
Some fans had already noticed the diminished critical coverage compared to the first season, which was met with near-universal acclaim and earned the show and the performances of its lead actors, Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, places on many end-of-year best-of lists. If anything, the show’s sophomore season had received an even higher percentage of glowing reviews, but the big splashy event coverage that other lauded shows often receive (and are receiving as we speak) was absent from notable mainstream outlets.
Plugged-in fans had also noticed a drop in viewership from the first season, at least according to publicly available metrics, and in advance of the June 9 episode, Slate published an article titled, “Interview With the Vampire Is the Best Show Almost Nobody Is Watching,” which laid out the those numbers plainly. Word started to spread—especially on up-to-the-minute platforms like X but also fanning out to places like Reddit, TikTok, and even my home base, Tumblr, which is far more likely to host gifsets, shitposts, or graduate-seminar-level analyses of the show than discussions of terrestrial television ratings.
AMC had announced IWTV’s second season before the first even aired, but halfway through the second there hadn’t been a peep about a third—and with a narrative brewing about “the best show nobody’s watching,” especially in the wake of an episode that so many were raving over, fan anxiety started to ratchet up about its fate. On X in particular, that groundswell quickly started to focus on AMC’s marketing efforts—and fans’ accusations that the network wasn’t doing enough to promote its own show set off a firestorm that brewed for days. “The marketing choices AMC is doing with Interview With the Vampire is self destructive,” one fan wrote. Or, in the words of another: “So mad they got me googling who is head of marketing at AMC.”
There can be a huge range of reasons why a show in 2024—this one or any other—doesn’t have the reach it deserves; endless pixels have been spilled on streamer fatigue and fractured audiences in the past few years. AMC, a darling of the prestige-TV-on-cable era, is in an especially strange position: Even when Interview’s first season was a hit on its streaming service, AMC+, it was still held up as an example of a troubled industry in transition. Two years and two Hollywood strikes later, the situation is even more complicated. As the industry restructures and changes who can watch what where, a disconnect has emerged between what viewers like and what critics do. At the same time, social media platforms—the loci of 21st-century word of mouth—continue to implode, fracturing the conversation of an already dispersed audience.
Most PopularGearPS5 vs PS5 Slim: What’s the Difference, and Which One Should You Get?By Eric RavenscraftGear13 Great Couches You Can Order OnlineBy Louryn StrampeGearThe Best Portable Power StationsBy Simon HillGearThe Best Wireless Earbuds for Working OutBy Adrienne So
Amidst this, IWTV faces specific hurdles due to the nature of the show. An adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel that pulls heavily from the many Vampire Chronicles books that followed, the show racebends many of its leads—its titular vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac, is now Black—and goes all in on the queerness of the books. And it is, of course, about vampires—specifically, vampires who do terrible things. “IWTV has so much that a modern audience could want from a series but, unfortunately, some people won’t receive it solely because it’s a queer horror show with majority BIPOC leads,” says Bobbi Miller, a culture critic who recaps the show on her YouTube channel. “Genre TV is always going to have to jump through more hoops for success than a standard drama.”
For the converted, the idea that more people aren’t watching Interview is maddening. One could certainly argue that the show, with its dark, twisted Gothicness and emotional maximalism, isn’t for everyone. But in an era of unceremonious cancellations—even of shows that execs touted as hits—and with an absence of information about the show’s future, it’s understandable that its most dedicated fans would be pushing for more viewers. Interview isn’t the only show whose fans question its marketing efforts; it’s a common accusation leveled at streamers of all sorts, especially when a show is canceled. But in this conversation, Interview fans pointed at specific decisions made by the network that many feel have made this season’s rollout feel so much more muted than the last.
“It’s been a conversation that fans have been talking about for a while now, but I think what really set them off was the comment made by Film Updates,” says Rei Gorrei, a fan who dubs herself the “Unofficial Vampire Chronicles Spokesperson.” A pop-culture aggregation account with nearly a million followers, Film Updates revealed they had been denied interview requests with the show’s talent—and since fans were worried no one was hearing about IWTV, they couldn’t understand why that reach wasn’t being capitalized on. “I think the combination of these things along with little marketing leaves fans in a word-of-mouth scenario where we now feel like it’s up to us to campaign for the season three renewal,” Gorrei says.
Many questioned the promotion the network had been implementing, too, like the decision to never have Anderson and Assad Zaman, whose characters’ romance is one of the main focuses of the season, interviewed together. Episode five in particular, with its explosive fight scene between the two, would have been a prime opportunity. (AMC did not respond to emails seeking comment for this story.) Other fans raised concerns about the unceremonious cancelation of the widely admired official podcast, whose Black female host, Naomi Ekperigin, felt like the perfect interviewer for a show with Black leads and nuanced racial storylines. Then there was the fact that too few episodes would air in time for Emmy consideration—not the fault of marketing, but yet one more source of fan worry.
Most PopularGearPS5 vs PS5 Slim: What’s the Difference, and Which One Should You Get?By Eric RavenscraftGear13 Great Couches You Can Order OnlineBy Louryn StrampeGearThe Best Portable Power StationsBy Simon HillGearThe Best Wireless Earbuds for Working OutBy Adrienne So
As the conversation directed at the official X account got heated, the AMC social team replied, sparking a dust-up that evoked the heady days of mid-2010s Twitter fandom, which regularly saw official accounts (remember Teen Wolf?) doing battle with—and sometimes capitalizing on the rancor of—contentious fans.
To be clear, AMC’s team did not engage the way those accounts once did—they instead wound up spinning it as a joke, poking fun at itself with a series of memes riffing on a line from the latest episode. But some fans continued to make comments about wanting to “take away” the show from the network, invoking one of the common paradoxes of modern fandom, where fans seek to divorce the thing they love by from the thing they think is harming it, like a showrunner, a director, or a network (the people who are, of course, the reason the thing they love exists).
“It is complicated,” says Bobbi Miller. She understands both sides of the equation: She's a fan, but she has also worked on social campaigns for film and TV. “I do think some of what the fans want from social [media] for this show is not always realistic.” Based on her experience, she says it’s likely that posts are part of a specific plan with approval processes—and it’s usually done by a whole team, not some lone intern as people on social media always suggest. “Not to mention that some things,” she adds, “especially ones that involve talent directly, aren’t always possible.” And in the flurry of conversation about the show’s promotion, many fans did acknowledge this—suggesting the social team was being stymied by the network itself.
Even with her sympathetic eye, Miller has also been confused by some of the decisions—though she stresses it’s all still a part of this balancing act. “Ultimately, no one’s ever going to be happy with the social coverage of the show because the objectives of a social campaign for a series are different than the objectives of the fandom,” she says. “I do want the show to get the major social and promotional push that it deserves and I’m not totally sure why that hasn’t happened, but I hope the network is taking note that the audience does want to see this show and its cast everywhere.”
That sort of symbiotic relationship between marketing and fans—where acolytes essentially act as ambassadors for their thing—is a thorny part of the fan labor conversation. But while some of Interview’s devotees worry that there’s too heavy a reliance on word-of-mouth, a lot of fans are still spreading the word—some even treat it like a full-time job. A lifelong Vampire Chronicles fan, Gorrei had watched AMC’s struggles with The Walking Dead fanbase and some of its smaller franchises, and decided to do whatever she could to help IWTV succeed. “I had basically made my own personal marketing strategy for this show,” she says.
Most PopularGearPS5 vs PS5 Slim: What’s the Difference, and Which One Should You Get?By Eric RavenscraftGear13 Great Couches You Can Order OnlineBy Louryn StrampeGearThe Best Portable Power StationsBy Simon HillGearThe Best Wireless Earbuds for Working OutBy Adrienne So
But even the most enthusiastic evangelists don’t actually work for the shows they love—and the entire push and pull of this situation underscores one of the biggest things plaguing television fandoms in 2024. Amidst the chaos of the industry and without the transparent signals of earlier eras like ratings or the seasonal calendar, fans don’t know the levers they need to pull to try to keep their favorite thing on the air—and sometimes, there aren’t any levers to pull at all. Long gone are the Bjo Trimble letter-writing campaigns of yore.
The broader atmosphere is one of fear and panic: After a decade of having the streamer rugs pulled out from under them, fans—and audiences more broadly—are afraid of getting invested in a show. Once invested, they’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Despite all the furor at the start of last week, fans did get some strong signs of hope by the end of it. While there still hasn’t been word that the show will be picked up for a third season, showrunner Rolin Jones re-upped a multiyear contract with the network on Friday. The next day, AMC announced a deal with Netflix to offer several of their titles on the streamer, Interview included. The show has always been framed as tentpole of a broader interconnected universe based on Anne Rice’s work, and despite the mixed signals of the past few weeks, it also seems like AMC is still all-in on that bet—the network also recently greenlit a third series based in the “Immortal Universe,” alongside The Mayfair Witches.
Miller agrees that these signals are very encouraging—and notes that AMC is famous for giving high-quality shows it believes in multiple seasons to find audience footing (see the eventual popularity of Breaking Bad or the continued renewal of Halt and Catch Fire—notably both projects of IWTV’s executive producer, Mark Johnson). And these sorts of investments go hand-in-hand with the dedication and commitment of long-term fans. “IWTV’s greatest allies,” Miller says, “are a dedicated fan base and a network that seems committed to giving the series time to blossom.”
