In an interview with America in 2014, the novelist Anne Rice said: “Vampires represent those of us in society who feel damned. And I am always seeking a way for them and those of us who identify with them to be saved.”

This idea rings true through the protagonists of her 15 vampire novels, who are wrought with theological torment and who grapple with the reality of their potential damnation. 

Ms. Rice’s first novel, Interview With the Vampire, came out in 1976. In the book, the journalist Daniel Molloy interviews the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac about his life. Beginning in New Orleans in the 1700s, Louis tells the story of how he met the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt and was bitten by him. It follows Louis and Lestat as they build a vampiric life in New Orleans and, eventually, how it all falls apart.

The book received its first film adaptation in 1994. Directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt and Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac, it was praised for its cinematography and production design. At the time, many Rice fans, and even Ms. Rice herself, doubted Mr. Cruise’s ability to pull off a credible turn as the vampire Lestat, but the actor proved them wrong. 

In 2022, Hollywood took a crack at a new adaptation, this time in the form of a TV show. The first two seasons of “Interview With the Vampire” on AMC covered the same content as the film with a few changes. The most dramatic change was turning Louis (Jacob Anderson) from a slaveholder in the 1700s to the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans in the 1900s. The TV show also moved the interview from the 1970s to 2022. 

The third season of “Interview With the Vampire” aired its final episode this July. Based on Ms. Rice’s second novel, The Vampire Lestat, it follows the life of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) who served as a secondary character to Louis in the book Interview With the Vampire. Because of this narrative shift, AMC decided to retitle the season from “Interview With the Vampire” to “The Vampire Lestat.” 

Watching “Interview With the Vampire” has always felt like watching someone’s confession. Whether it is Louis’s self-sabotaging interview in the first two seasons, or Lestat’s performative retelling of his life in the third season, each of them reveals damning truths and asks the viewer to consider their guilt.

For me, the third season falls short of its predecessors, particularly when it comes to this confessional narrative style.

Using the narrative device of a voiceover from a collection of records sold at auction and clips from an in-progress documentary, Lestat recounts his life before meeting Louis and his journey to becoming a (semi) famous rock star. The plot is essentially the same as that of the book, but with more time spent with the modern rocker Lestat, rather than on his past. The show utilizes a nonlinear style paired with rambling narration to attempt to construct Lestat’s past and present at the same time. 

Compared to the haunting storybook presented in the first two seasons of “Interview With the Vampire,” I found this nonlinear style missed the mark. What was shown was a confusing, stilted conglomeration of scenes. I could tell I was meant to find something deeper but it lacked the core to provide that depth. Scenes cut between Lestat’s childhood in 18th-century rural France to his years in Paris to an undisclosed period in which Lestat protected an ancient vampire to his concert tour in 2025; it was presumably intended to provide answers to why Lestat is the way he is. But it only left me unclear about what was real and what was hallucination.

Ms. Rice, who died from complications of a stroke in 2021, was, in my view, an expert on the morally gray. (Maybe this is unsurprising for someone who was born Catholic, left the faith, publicly came back to the church and then later distanced herself from institutional religion.) Her characters do unequivocally bad things. Both Lestat and Louis attempt to kill each other multiple times, yet they are never defined by those moments. They save each other, they protect others, they make stupid decisions and smart ones—they are multifaceted. And, in the novels, they are given the time and space to show this complexity. 

The confessional style used in the book, and expanded in the show, is the perfect vehicle for this. The first two seasons center on Louis reckoning with his past actions. Viewing key moments of his life nearly 100 years later, it appears he is asking, if not for forgiveness, at least for understanding. This most recent season struggled to live up to this standard. Even as Lestat repented, it felt hollow. 

The character I was looking forward to the most in this season was Gabrielle de Lioncourt, Lestat’s mother. In the book, Gabrielle is an inarguably abusive figure in Lestat’s life, but she also represents a woman fighting back against social pressures put on her. When Lestat turns her into a vampire, she sees it as an opportunity to reject her identity as the wife of a nobleman and become her own person. She adopts a masculine look, primarily by taking and wearing the clothes of the men she kills. 

Gabrielle feels no ties to human standards once she is transformed, and her rejection of that world is fascinating to read. The way she grapples with her role in society is a significant aspect of her character. While it does not justify how she treats Lestat, it gives a complexity to her character in true Anne Rice fashion. 

In the TV show, Gabrielle has been renamed Gabriella. As played by Jennifer Ehle, she becomes a caricature. Her freedom arc is not one of rejecting gender and society. Instead, she takes on an extreme sexuality, her masculine identity sidelined for skin tight clothes and a bob. Paired with her discount-store-Dracula accent, Gabriella made me cringe every time she was on screen.

Mr. Anderson and Mr. Reid as Louis and Lestat still give excellent performances. For me, Louis is still the beating heart of the show. In a season with so much inconsistent characterization, Mr. Anderson’s obvious understanding of his character is intoxicating. His subtlety is like a breath of fresh air in a season that began to feel like a melodramatic faceoff.

I also found myself drawn to Eric Bogosian’s performance as the world-weary journalist Daniel Molloy, in particular to his relationship with another vampire, Armand (Assad Zaman). After being originally introduced in the first season as a secondary character, Armand has grown to be central to the plot. He transformed Daniel into a vampire at the end of the second season, a reveal fans have been waiting to hear more about. Their story bubbles beneath the surface of this season, but as time went on I found myself wishing Mr. Reid and Ms. Ehle’s scene would end so I could watch Mr. Bogosian and Mr. Zaman verbally spar.

Mr. Zaman, as the vampire Armand, is like Anderson in his ability to steal a scene, and do it without shouting in a ridiculous accent. In a show that began as a thriller but has grown closer to an over-the-top melodrama, Mr. Zaman is still able to come off creepy, his wide, unblinking eyes and melodic voice making him appear strikingly inhuman. This season it seemed to have been forgotten that Ms. Rice wrote gothic horror, not campy vampire soap operas. But Mr. Zaman brought that energy back in the finale, giving a thoroughly terrifying performance. 

Despite my reservations about “The Vampire Lestat,” I am still a fan of this version of Rice’s vampire world. I adore the first two seasons of the TV show. I will likely rewatch this third season more than once, as I have done the others. But I think it falls short. I never felt like I was hearing someone’s confession. I didn’t sense that his regrets for his actions went that deep. 

Ms. Rice’s characters are constantly on a quest for meaning. Lestat is much the same. His desire to change the world in favor of vampires comes from a place of deep insecurity about what he is meant to do with his (non) life. Despite the fast pace of this season, that desire for meaning never really came through. Even as Lestat speaks the final lines of the season, “The fault was mine. All mine,” I found myself doubting whether he truly felt that guilt. If this were an actual confession to a priest, I don’t think he would have received absolution. Or at least as a viewer, I wouldn’t have given it.

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Nora Malone is a summer intern at America Media.