[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for the February 23 episode of Mayfair Witches.]
Ask any witch and they will tell you: If one ingredient is off, the brew isn’t going to boil. It’s a lesson AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches learned the hard way in season one.
In the wake of Interview With The Vampire, its more visually and viscerally searing predecessor in the network’s Immortal Universe, Mayfair Witches just felt off right out of the gate. The story of Rowan Mayfair (Alexandra Daddario), an intuitive doctor who learns she descends from a centuries-old lineage of witches, is a cornerstone of Rice’s work and it deserves an episodic treatment worthy of its vast scope. But the series’ handling of that dense mythology, centered on the Mayfairs’ demonic leech Lasher (Jack Huston) and his seductive grooming of Rowan, was too self-serious to be engaging in season one. It treated the pruning of this magical family tree, which should have been a darkly enchanting mystery, like it was a brooding prestige drama about tedious genealogical research. While credit is due for even trying to tame Rice’s wild story, the series came off as checking boxes rather than actually leading to a substantive interpretation of the tale. (For reference, season one led to Rowan having sex with Lasher, getting pregnant, and giving birth to a rapidly aging baby minutes after conception that would serve as a human vessel for Lasher’s soul.) It was a chore to watch at times, which is perhaps the greatest sin one can commit when adapting the lush writing of Rice.
All of this placed on season two the dubious task of course correcting before it was too late. Fortunately for those who braved its return in January, the show understood the assignment laid at its feet. The first signs of new life came in the season’s embrace of Rowan and Lasher’s bizarrely redrawn relationship, which abruptly switched from heated lovers to strained mother and son. Yes, you read that right. As the person who gestated his new flesh vessel, Lasher’s deep well of power was transferred to Rowan, so long as the spawn (who has no memory of his former life) remained close by. It was a smart reassessment of the chilly Rowan, first presented as a hesitant successor to the Mayfair crown, who now must accept her place among her ancestors and also figure out how to wield her sudden infusion of power and maternal instincts, both of which prove to be intoxicating forces. The show also wisely introduces a foil for Rowan in the form of her estranged cousin, Moira (Alyssa Jirrels). Where last season Rowan had a Greek chorus of dead Mayfair women to judge her from the spiritual plane, Moira comes out swinging in the opening days of Rowan’s familial reign with serious questions about her aptitude for the job. She is spry and no-nonsense, the antithesis of Rowan’s subdued energy. And she throws her kin off balance, giving Rowan’s ascension to the Mayfair throne a welcome dash of mortal complication.
But the most exhilarating evidence that Mayfair Witches has found its footing came in season two’s penultimate episode.Rowan, Moira, her smarmy father, Cortland (Harry Hamlin), and her rekindled love interest, Lark (Ben Feldman), head to Scotland in search of Lasher, who has been kidnapped by the local Mayfairs, effectively severing the metaphorical umbilical cord that feeds Rowan his power. The Scots need Lasher’s reincarnated form to fulfill a prophecy that would imbue every member of the Scottish Mayfairs with the powers of a magical race known as the Taltos. All they need to do is marry Lasher off to his fated mate, Emaleth (Henessi Schmidt), who is introduced draped in sheer white and riding an ox bareback. There isn’t much Rowan & co. can do to thwart the marriage, so they watch and plot as their Scottish brothers plan a ritualistic wedding ceremony. But things take a turn for the (even more) outlandish when the bride and groom emerge from either side of the altar restrained by leashes and harnesses. Handlers have been charged with keeping the feral beats they evoke in each other at bay long enough to say vows. If you need a mental picture, think about those little kids you see on leashes being held back from running off through Disney World. The confounding scene is met with smiles from the family-heavy crowd, save for a bewildered Rowan, who looks on as the marriage is declared and the leashes are cut, letting the hungry newlyweds collide into each other in a fit of flesh and passion under the altar. As a thin sheet falls over them, they consummate their marriage as the prophecy requires in front of the audience, whose pandemonium for the satisfied prophecy is matched only by the roar of drums.
This all sounds absurd on paper, but damn if it isn’t one of the most surreal TV moments in recent memory. And this is what the show’s audience has been waiting for. Rice’s stories are page-turners, barn burners, and cultural shockers. They evoke anticipation of her habit for subverting expectation and elicit the kind of uncomfortable laughter that comes from confronting the darker realities of humanity. By accepting that edict as its guide, Mayfair Witches suddenly feels more alive than ever. Whereas Interview With The Vampire earns its dark emotion and solemnity because of its achingly romantic bleeding heart, this show gets eccentric stripes for being proud that it’s the weird family down the street (which, ironically, is how the Mayfairs were offhandedly described in the former’s freshman season). For all of the moments that season one played straight so as not to lose the literal interpretation of Rice’s story, Lasher’s animalistic marriage and much of season two is liberated from such uninspired impersonation. Finally, this twisted take on family ties seems ready to get as weird as Rice intended.
