Last week saw the premiere of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire TV show, an uncalled-for small-screen adaptation of a beloved vampire film that repackages the genre’s familiar tropes – primarily, a heedless young female hemovore reined in by her older male handler, who constantly wrestles with the cloudy morality of their untenable lifestyle – with a more diverse cast and timely nods to the now. Those not taken with the update of Anne Rice’s dark fable yet invested in its basic setup will be relieved to find that this week brings another series fitting that exact description, complete with matching sexual metaphors. Though this viewer would also be disappointed to discover that Let the Right One In, a reimagining of the Swedish bestseller that’s already spawned two well-regarded movies, suffers from the same ailment of needless elongation due to a surfeit of subplots padding the original text. A feature’s worth of story cannot always be made to fill a serial run time, but it seems that that’s not going to stop anyone from trying.
This odd twinning comes not from a sudden demand for vampiric content in specific, but a vaster decline in television’s green-lighting protocols. An addiction to intellectual property has convinced executives that anything anyone has enjoyed at any point in the past should and must be revived to reap the bounties of name recognition. This shaky, oft-disproved logic is at its most problematic in the case of cinema-to-TV conversion, which invariably occupies its many hours with world-building that overdraws on premises already realized to completion. As for the new project created by playwright Andrew Hinderaker (his experience in the macabre on Penny Dreadful qualifying him for the gig), that means an offbeat inflection on usual bloodsucker lore also needs to accommodate a murder mystery, a cop procedural, a sci-fi soap opera and the occasional dash of haute restaurant drama straight out of The Bear. With so many plates a-spinning, the relationships between characters get winnowed down to simpler and more conventional forms, somehow developed less in eight hours than they’ve already been in two, twice over.
