A good spy series is hard to find. Long-form can be a great platform for the mystery, intrigue, and twists inherent in the genre — but it’s not a catch-all for a weak story. Throwing in a supernatural element also has the capacity to make or break, as the next chapter in AMC’s Immortal Universe, Talamasca: The Secret Order, dolefully demonstrates.
Talamasca is based loosely on the work of Anne Rice, whose Interview with the Vampire has already been adapted (and to great success) by AMC. After two seasons of intimate storytelling, Talamasca is set to kick the door to the Immortal universe wide open: where Interview only teased the inner workings of vampires, witches, and other creatures of the night, its spinoff had the freedom to explore it all with gusto. But Talamasca doesn’t open the floodgates so much as it tiptoes into the wider world of Anne Rice. It’s a much subtler, slower show than Interview, perhaps because it focuses more on the humans of its secret society than the unbridled theatrics of a centuries-spanning vampire love affair. That’s not inherently damning — if AMC is really serious about expanding this franchise, it needs a variety of stories from multiple perspectives. The problem is that the perspectives featured in Talamasca aren’t compelling enough to justify its existence.
Even after years of painstaking set-up in Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches, AMC’s lesser-known Anne Rice spinoff, Talamasca emerges half-baked. That stagnancy feels counterintuitive: showrunners John Lee Hancock and Mark Lafferty have something close to total freedom with this spinoff. The Talamasca, a clandestine organization that monitors supernatural threats, is an overarching presence in Rice’s novels — but they’ve never been the focus. Questions and curiosities abound about the organization, so Talamasca creates a handful of original characters to ask and (hopefully, in time) answer those questions.
The series follows the story of Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton), a regular everyman who has no idea that a supernatural world exists all around him. A show like Talamasca does need an avatar, one that can take its audience by the hand and bring novices into this world. But after something like Interview, which dives headlong into the supernatural without a shred of hesitation, starting over with a total skeptic feels like a step back. It doesn’t help that Guy’s whole deal is to ask questions he never really gets answers to. Talamasca keeps him in the dark as a means of maintaining the series’ central mystery, but after the fifth plea for context, the routine gets old fast.
Guy does eventually take matters into his own hands and step into his destiny... but again, it takes some time to get there. He’s more connected to the unseen world than he knows, thanks to a knack for clairvoyance that he’s suppressed from childhood. He treats the gift more like a chronic migraine, but it’s the very thing that makes him so useful to the enigmatic Helen (Elizabeth McGovern). She’s the head of the Talamasca’s New York branch, also known as a “Mother House,” and she wants to recruit Guy as her newest agent. Talamasca picks up whenever McGovern’s on-screen — not only because she delivers the exposition that mercifully moves this plot forward, but because she delivers it all with a surprising warmth, injecting a mostly-stagnant series with life.
Helen is one of many Talamasca characters much more interesting than Guy, if only because she’s the one person who knows exactly what’s going on. She explains the plight of the Talamasca piecemeal, but the thrust of the conflict is this: the society’s London branch has gone rogue, a very important document containing all the Talamasca’s intel and secrets is in the wind, and a shady vampire named Jasper (William Fichtner) desperately wants to find it. The how and the why of it all is for Guy, his handler Olive (Maisie Richardson-Sellers), and a handful of unlikely characters — all tackling the problem from different angles — to figure out.
There’s also a much more personal mystery for Guy to solve in his downtime, as he has reason to believe the Talamasca have something to do with the demise of his mother. She’s mentioned briefly in Interview with the Vampire — not the series itself, but in the memoir written by journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) about the vampire Louis du Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson). Talamasca sprinkles in a few connections to Interview in its first season, but is mostly its own thing... if only it knew exactly what that thing is.
With everyone holding a different piece of this puzzle, and Jasper causing supernatural havoc on his own time, Talamasca is able to stretch its conflict out even further. But a drawn-out conspiracy does not a compelling story make, and the series lacks the urgency to show us why this is all worth solving. A supernatural spy series should fill a void that no show has ever faced, but Talamasca can’t fully reconcile its two worlds. It’s a jumble of tragic backstories, demises, and betrayals in its early episodes — and even if it does all eventually click, the promise of resolution just isn’t enough. There’s a promising — even interesting — show lurking in the shadows, but waiting for that show to manifest itself just doesn’t seem worth it.
