when a new AMC episode Interview with the Vampire aired on the Sunday before last, a particular kind of fuse was lit in online conversations about the show. The fifth installment of the second season, “Don’t Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape,” was an impeccably written and acted miniature horror movie: the kind of thing you watch with your mouth open, before pointing at the TV and saying, “Are you watching this too?!?!”
Yet when thousands of people took to social media to ask that very question, much of the comments were underlined by confusion, even concern, that people weren’t, in fact, seeing it either, that they weren’t. seeing. Interview with the Vampire absolutely. For a show so good, many said, it was criminal that more people didn’t watch and discuss it, and that more critics didn’t cover it. “This is the best show on television right now,” cultural reporter Kyle Buchanan wrote in The New York Times. a widely shared tweet. “I feel excited because everyone would rather talk about middle-of-the-road or bad shows instead of watching the gold standard!”
Some fans had already noted the decline in critical coverage compared to the first season, which was met with near-universal praise and earned the show and the performances of its lead actors, Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, spots among the finale’s best. of year. -of lists. If anything, the show’s second season had received an even higher percentage of rave reviews, but the heavy coverage of splashy events that other lauded shows often receive (and are receiving as we speak) was absent from notable mainstream outlets.
Tuned fans had also noticed a drop in viewership since the first season, at least according to publicly available metrics, and ahead of the June 9 episode, Slate published an article titled: “Interview with the Vampire It’s the best show that almost no one watches”, which states those numbers clearly. Word began to spread, especially on cutting-edge platforms like graduates. seminar-level program analysis than discussions of terrestrial television ratings.
AMC had announced IWTVThe second season even before the first aired, but halfway through the second, nothing had been heard about a third, and with a narrative brewing about “the best show no one watches,” especially after an episode that so many were excited, fans’ anxiety began to rise over his fate. On “The marketing choices AMC is making Interview with the Vampire It’s self-destructive.” a fan wrote. Or, in the words of another: “I’m so angry they made me Google who the head of marketing at AMC is.”
There may be a huge variety of reasons why a program in 2024, this or any other, does not have the reach it deserves; In recent years, endless pixels have been poured out about streamer fatigue and fractured audiences. AMC, a darling of the era of prestige cable television, finds itself in an especially strange position: Even when InterviewThe first season of was a success on its streaming service, AMC+, it was still put as an example of an industry in transition with problems. Two years and two strikes in Hollywood later, the situation is even more complicated. As the industry restructures and changes, who can watch what and where? a disconnection has arisen between what viewers like and what critics do. At the same time, social media platforms – the sites of word-of-mouth in the 21st century – continue to implode, fracturing the conversation of an already dispersed audience.