Talamasca Can’t Stand on Its Own
The first sign that Talamasca: The Secret Order is not going to pick up the maximalist mantle from sister series Interview With the Vampire is that its main character’s name is … Guy. A guy named Guy. A guy named Guy who was a super-special psychic boy before growing into a super-special psychic man with a shadowy organization following him around and a fate he’s unaware of. The clichés pile up quickly, and Talamasca gets buried under them.
Premiering with two episodes on AMC on Sunday, October 26, Talamasca is the latest entry in the network’s Immortal Universe adaptation of Anne Rice properties, which also includes two seasons of the exceptional Interview With the Vampire (season three arrives next year) and two seasons of the more formulaic Mayfair Witches (also renewed for a third season). Their story lines are connected by the Talamasca, a secret society that keeps tabs on the world’s vampires, witches, ghosts, and demons, like archivists and librarians trained in combat and engaged in spycraft. Do you need all that context to dive into Talamasca? Not necessarily, and that’s the problem: Talamasca doesn’t feel fleshed out enough to stand on its own. Season one may only be six episodes, but it’s padded out with meandering subplots, vague teases for a second-season mystery, and one overly long and slow-motion-dependent scene at a nightclub. Was I supposed to be titillated by the image of three people kissing? I’ve seen kinkier stuff on Charmed.
The series begins with Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton, whose mannerisms and line deliveries are distractingly reminiscent of Eddie Redmayne) about to graduate law school. He knows the big firms aren’t taking him seriously, so when a mysterious woman named Helen (Elizabeth McGovern, leaving Downton Abbey behind with a bleach-white wig and conniving mien) offers him $5,000 to hear her out on a gig with the Talamasca, Guy takes her up on it. Her business card with the slogan “We watch and we are always here” is pretty weird, but Helen’s pitch is even weirder: The Talamasca is a privately funded group devoted to “academia and discovery” and “the world of the supernatural” with “Mother Houses” all over the world, including New York City, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong. Guy’s ready to blow her off as a madwoman — until she says she knows he can read minds. It’s a talent he’s kept locked away inside himself with prescription pills and hours spent alone in the quiet NYU Law library, but Helen covets that ability for her own ends.
Talamasca wants viewers to invest in these two as a pair — Guy as the resistant, questioning prodigy and Helen as his no-nonsense, charmingly manipulative mother figure — but the series doesn’t develop Guy well enough to make their relationship worth caring about. Helen sends him on an off-the-books job to the London Mother House to use his mind-probing powers on Jasper (William Fichtner), a powerful vampire with a personal vendetta against the Talamasca. As Guy does Helen’s bidding and gets pulled into Jasper’s confidence, he’s ping-ponged from emergency to emergency with no willpower of his own. When Guy and Helen spar, she comes off like she’s indulging him rather than engaging with an equal. Actors like Eric Bogosian and Jason Schwartzman waltz in and schmooze it up as vampires living their best afterlives, completely overshadowing Denton, who’s stuck in noob-human mode and doesn’t progress much past that. Placing the protagonist in the middle of so many secrets and using him principally as a receptacle for other characters’ exposition dumps puts him at a disadvantage — after a whole season, it’s difficult to say what makes Guy tick or what he actually believes about the order and its (alleged) commitment to fairness.
Talamasca is primarily interested in playing with fantastical concepts rather than unpacking or challenging them, which makes for moderately entertaining smooth-brained television. Way back when, Talamasca, with its light sexual content, beleaguered protagonist, and slightly corny bad guy, could’ve slotted comfortably into a weeknight WB or CW lineup alongside Supernatural and Roswell. But Interview With the Vampire set a precedent for transformative TV from the Immortal Universe, its narrative and visual audacity subverting adaptation tropes and genre storytelling by challenging viewers’ notions of immortality, sexuality, and destiny. Where Interview With the Vampire is ambitious, Talamasca is brand management, and as the season progresses, you can sense how desperately it’s trying to prove its own worth and failing.
Talamasca lacks a creative core, a problem that could stem from the source: Unlike Interview with the Vampire or Mayfair Witches, it isn’t a one-to-one adaptation of Rice’s novels. It’s neither reinterpretation nor reassessment but a tenuous attempt to chart a thin through-line that isn’t the primary reason people watch either other series. The series spends a fair amount of time — too much — on the organization’s espionage prowess; more than once, Helen narrates a complicated plan of dead drops, coded messages, and leaked fake intel that plays out in montage form with her voiceover, and the ensemble is littered with double agents who have abandoned the Talamasca’s mission to pursue individual hustles. The goal is clearly to emulate a series like Slow Horses or The Americans, yet all that attention paid to what the Talamasca does wrong only amplifies how the show fails to sketch a genuine identity for the group. These characters are reacting to a baseline that hasn’t been established yet, which makes their betrayals unmoored.
As of now, Talamasca is not built for longevity or reflective of Rice’s opulent style. If AMC views it as the future of its Immortal Universe, a potential second season needs to dream bigger and swing wilder. Until then, Talamasca: The Secret Order is simultaneously underdeveloped and overleveraged, a series that already feels like it has one foot in the coffin.