First Impressions: AMC’s Mayfair Witches, "The Witching Hour” (Ep 1)

This isn’t your typical hocus-pocus witches who brew around the cauldron and cast spells. This is a dark soap-opera drama about a dysfunctional family with secrets and skeletons in their attic. So, be prepared to venture out of your comfort zone and into some witchy-southern-gothic world, it’s going to be a wild ride!

Rowan Fielding (Alexandra Daddari) is career-driven woman and a Neurosurgeon. She has a powerful gift where she can cause someone to have seizures - so don’t piss her off! She feels alone and scared of her psychic gifts that she was born with. She has no knowledge that she comes from a linage of a powerful witch family, the Mayfairs. As Rowan dives deeper into her family’s dark history, she meets an evil spirit named Lasher whose been haunting the family for many generations. 

If anyone who’s new to the series, I should warn you what crazy shit your about to get into. The Mayfairs are one-big incestuous family. I know, it’s creepy, disgusting, and there’s a lot of inbreeding. The Mayfairs believe that procreating within their bloodlines will produce powerful witches in the future. I have no clue as to how the show will address this issue. I don’t mind if they make changes to the problematic things and tone it down. I wish the show creators good luck on navigating around this mess!

This season is an adaptation of the first novel, The Witching Hour. This book is a giant-behemoth because it’s 1000+ pages long. The story is very complex and it goes in depth of EVERY Lives of the Mayfair Witches, literally. I can see that the show will take short cuts and split the arcs into several seasons - if it gets lucky to have more than 2 seasons. The first episode does a good job at presenting the main thesis of the story.

It looks like it will focus on building Rowan’s story and showing flash backs to her birth mother, Deirdre. Through Deidre’s past, we see what the Mayfairs are like and her relationship with “the man,” Lasher. In the present day, Deirdre is in a vegetable state and her only caretakers are her aunt and uncle: Carlotta and Cortland. I do find Deirdre’s story very fascinating and also very tragic. I feel sorry for her because living with a chaotic-incestuous family and dealing with Lasher, made her life a living hell. So, I am looking forward to see that in TV form.

Unfortunately, I am disappointed that they’ve replaced Micheal Curry, Rowan’s future husband, with AMC’s fan fiction character: Ciprien Grieve (Tongayi Chirisa). They’ve combined his character with Micheal and Aaron Lighter. Aaron is a Talamasca member, a group of psychic-paranormal researchers. It would make more sense if they had kept Micheal and let him take Aaron's job. Since, they both have similar goals and want to protect Rowan from Lasher. I just don’t understand why they would leave out such an important character and I don’t consider Ciprien part of the canon since he’s not in the books. (To say the quite part out loud: It seems like Hollywood is very anti-masculinity, especially if it’s a white man. I hope that’s not the reason why they changed him).

We don’t know much about Ciprien other than he’s a Talamasca agent and he has the power to see the past by touching objects and people. He shares the same ability as Micheal. However, I wonder will he also share a similar backstory, how will his first meeting go with Rowan and how will they explain where he got his powers from? 

The main villain, Lasher (Jack Huntson), he’s a specter who is bound by a Mayfair designee to serve them. Lasher is the most compelling part of the story. He uses the Mayfairs as pawns in order to achieve his grand goal. He is very charming, seductive, manipulative, and uses sex as leverage. He’s basically the devil. There is a power play between him and all the Mayfairs. They think that they can tame him, but they always fall right into his arms. It questions who’s really in charge of one’s life? Who’s serving who?

Jack Huntson as Lasher has not won me over yet. It's too early to tell. But I do like he's sultry voice. I hope in the early episodes we don't see so much of him so that it can slowly build up the suspense and mystery. Similar to the book, at the start, you get small glimpses of "the man" and learning more of him through many eyewitness account. Especially in the files of the Mayfair Witches, which the Talamsaca has gathered info on the family history. Anne Rice does best in building suspense, gloom, and sucking you into a dark-beautiful abyss with poetic imagery. So I hope it reflects that in the TV show.

Some of the Mayfair characters will crossover to the Vampire Chronicles and that’s the reason why it’s adapted into a TV series. Hence AMC's Immortal Universe. I hope that the show does well and be successful. Although, I think that the Mayfair series may not be as popular as The Vampire Chronicles. There’s less promo done for the Mayfair TV, while the Interview with the Vampire TV has more love, merchandise, fan art and a bigger fanbase. (I can tell where all of their budget went to). Which I don’t blame because the Mayfair series is a required taste. It's up to the audience: if they want more seasons, then vote with your money.

Trailer
Twitter/X: @MayfairWitches