It isn’t only Lestat and his vampiric cohorts that are coming soon to TV. Anne Rice’s other major supernatural creations, the Mayfair family of witches, are now officially joining them. Announced by AMC, the network has officially greenlit Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, a new series based on her Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. This series will follow Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire with a late 2022 premiere. Eight episodes will make up the first season.
Esta Spalding and Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex) are both executive producers and writers of the series. Spalding will serve as showrunner. According to the official description, “The series will focus on an intuitive young neurosurgeon who discovers that she is the unlikely heir to a family of witches. As she grapples with her newfound powers, she must contend with a sinister presence that has haunted her family for generations.”
In a statement, Spalding and Ashford said: “The world of witches has fascinated and terrified for centuries. And yet Anne Rice’s particular lens on witches explored something new altogether. Women who are powerful, often brutal, and always committed to subverting our current power structures. We are so excited to join our partners AMC and Gran Via Productions in making this mysterious and provocative world come to life.”
So far, this sounds pretty in line with the books. The first book of the Mayfair Witches saga was the 1990’s The Witching Hour. The novel focused on a neurosurgeon named Rowan Mayfair, who discovers she is the latest designee in a family of powerful witches. All of whom have lived in New Orleans for generations.
These witches commune and often control a powerful spirit named Lasher. In fact, Lasher is the name of the second book in the Mayfair Witches trilogy, arriving in 1993. The following year, the final novel in the saga, Taltos, hit bookstores. Rice’s Garden District house was actually the setting of the Mayfair’s ancestral home in the series.
That wasn’t the end of the Mayfair witches, however. They did share a universe with Rice’s vampires from the start. But the references to her undead world were mainly Easter eggs. Starting with 2000’s Merrick, Rice officially crossed over her vampire and witch storylines. This continued with the novels Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle. It seems likely that AMC is also looking towards crossing over the two series at some point.
Interestingly, fans were not very happy with the Mayfair/vampire crossover books when they came out. And Anne Rice herself has more or less stricken them from the canon of her later vampire novels. It will be interesting to see if they choose to crossover these worlds in a totally different way than Rice did. We expect a lot more news about both series in the coming months.
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