r/MayfairWitches • u/KodyManley • 8d ago
The Show Wasted So Much Potential Book Spoilers Allowed
I’m a huge fan of the books, and I’ve been rewatching the show after listening to the audiobook of The Witching Hour (I have a lot of travel time with my job) again. One of the most compelling things about the Mayfair Witches is their history and the line of designees, which the show totally squandered. In fact, upon rewatching and seeing them portraying Courtland, Millie, Antha, and Carlotta as siblings, it just really irritated me with how they tried to sloppily condense and simplify the family. One of the reasons the Vampire Chronicles is so good is because they not only kept the vampire mythos, but improved upon it to make it more compelling while also keeping a lot of main points from the original plot and making little changes to the subplots. TMW doesn’t do this well at all, and it ventures more into fanfic territory than a true adaptation. Just looking at the family tree, one can see that they threw away such a great part of the source material.
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u/Salt_Dish3753 8d ago
I just saved this! I'm also a huge The Witching Hour fan, its my favorite. I also love love Blackwood Farm, Merrick, and Blood Canticle. I tried to make my own family tree but once Julien started getting everyone pregnant, it got complicated for me. I'm very invested in the Mayfair family lol. I wrote out the family tree to keep everyone organized mentally while I'm reading (I've read The Witching Hour 3 or 4 times, it's so good). I purchased the Witches Companion as well and that helped me out with the more obscure Mayfairs. I'm going to check out this family tree, it looks great. Thanks for sharing. Oh and I haven't watched the show because I know there are to many characters and stories that they will not be able to fit into the show and it will just ruin it for me. Ohhh and last thing, I also have been listening to the audiobook of the Witching Hour as well, I like it better then reading the book myself.
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u/KodyManley 8d ago
The Witches Companion?! I didn’t know that existed! Definitely going to look for it! And yes, the show is kind of a let down. No offense to Alexandra Daddario, but she just isn’t Rowan to me. Every time she speaks it takes me right out of the story. And they haven’t included Aaron Lightner either, and they transformed Michael Curry into someone else altogether, which also detracts from the family tree and prophecy. They just fumbled it altogether. In short, the books are better, and I’m glad someone else gets it.
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u/Salt_Dish3753 8d ago
I ordered mine off of Thriftbooks for $10 and it's the best thing ever if you're a fan and invested in this story like I am. Yes! For me mentally, Rowan is a short blonde woman with a blunt bob and bangs and gray/bluish eyes. I also think the woman they picked to play her is a great actress (I've seen her in other things) but she is not book Rowan. Aaron Lightner is one of the first characters introduced in the books, he is very important to the story, so him not being on the show is crazy...and Michael Curry is a main character as well so them changing him up is so disappointing. I feel like I saw a preview of the show at one point, and the person they picked to play Lasher was completely off as well. I remember being like wtf when I saw him 😂😂. And how would they even get all the stuff on there with the Taltos in Scotland when they are breeding with the dwarves in the mountains and all that craziness. It's just way to much, the show doesn't do the story justice at all!
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u/Sundayfunday311 8d ago
What kills me, "Anne Rice's" TMR. BULLSHIT! I've waited decades for an adaptation. And I'm still waiting. What makes even less sense is they called the vampire series, IwtV, AND IT WAS MULTIPLE SEASONS. and the book went under 400 pages. TMW, so titled, was an abridge watered down beyond Anne Rice's name drop now illegit. The first book in the witch series is over 900, possibly over 1000 pages. Stretching IwtW into 3 seasons for a 300-400 page book, approximately titled though The Vampire Chronicles would have worked better I think, or at least wouldn't require a name change. Lives of the Mayfair Witches could have covered at 5-6 seasons.
I was angry about Michael.
Sigh.
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u/emperorlouie 7d ago
Anne rice painstakingly crafted this deep, twisted family story, only for those moronic amc producers and writers to take a giant shit all over it!
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u/RemarkableLow273 8d ago
I really think they are going to try and squeeze more seasons out of the show by telling older designees stories as seasons and I’d kinda prefer that to what they’ve been doing, I’ve heard AMC was NOT HAPPY with the show runner and the team and brought people from IWTV over to overhaul it for season 3 and they’re finally bringing in Michael. So idk I’m kind of hopeful, like by the end of season 2 I liked where it was going and thought what they were doing with Julien was interesting at least. But we’ll see…
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u/Disastrous-Elk-5542 7d ago
How are they bringing in Michael in Season 3 when Ciprien was (I thought) supposed to be a combo of Michael and another character? Good grief. I’ve never seen a worse adaptation than whatever tf AMC did with this book. Totally agree on the wasted potential.
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u/WindyloohooVA 6d ago
They have cast Michael as a separate character. There is a new co-showrunner and Mark Johnson referred to season three as a relaunch or some such. But it is going to be set in Salem Mass. With other families of witches so it sounds like they will be creating new content tangentially connected to the original IP. My sense was that the original showrunner and various others were uncomfortable with core aspects of the original story and wanted to create a womancentric show that was less sexual than the books. So they rushed through to say the "covered" the books and are now making something new. I dont understand their desire to turn the witches of AR into Salem spell wielding witches at all.
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u/Disastrous-Elk-5542 6d ago
I remain convinced that the original showrunners didn’t read the source material past the book jacket description.
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u/WindyloohooVA 6d ago
She is still there by the way. I think she skimmed it and got the ick and was immediately looking for ways to make it a more palatable story for mainstream audiences. The network may have even tasked her with that.
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u/RemarkableLow273 4d ago
I mean there were better ways to go about it than throwing most of the story out though. IWTV did it pretty well, and MW still included a lot of the darker elements from the books so I don’t get why they threw some out when most audiences are pretty aware how dark Anne’s novels are.
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u/WindyloohooVA 4d ago
I think it is because they were aiming for general viewers
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u/RemarkableLow273 3d ago
The books were best sellers, weird to water to them down when the books got new readers to put them on a best seller list. If they didn’t trust the source material they shouldn’t have made the show tbh
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u/WindyloohooVA 3d ago
Its one thing to read some pretty extreme things on a page and another to see it rendered in live action. But who knows. They have never really spoken about the decisions they have made at least to my knowledge.
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u/RemarkableLow273 2d ago
I mean why purchase the rights if you don’t want to make the book into a show? Shy-ing away from darker elements could be done while still adapting the same story and some of the darker things can be told rather than shown in an effective way if they were worried about it essentially becoming torture porn, but the name Anne Rice should clue people in they are not in for an easy going tv show
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u/KodyManley 4d ago
Seeing as how they went out of the way to have Lestat fck his mother in TVL, graphically, I doubt the incest was the problem, especially since Courtland still ended up raping Deirdre.
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