AMC must be feeling pretty good about getting into bed with Netflix right about now. Thanks to a deal between the two, several AMC shows hit the streaming platform on August 19, 2024, and almost immediately began climbing the Netflix charts. It’s a gratifying turn of events for the AMC faithful who’ve been tuning into the network for years, only to see their favorites overshadowed time and again by bigger productions on HBO or Showtime. (That is, unless your series involves Don Draper, Walter White, or zombies.)
The underseen Western crime drama “Dark Winds,” for instance, has now found a whole new audience thanks to this agreement. Meanwhile, it appears a lot of people have only just learned that “Kevin Can F*** Himself” — the critically-acclaimed dark meta-sitcom starring Alexis Rose herself, aka “Schitt’s Creek” alum Annie Murphy — even exists thanks to its premiere on Netflix. According to viewership aggregator FlixPatrol, “Dark Winds” has even become the third-most streamed show of the last three days on Netflix as of August 22, 2024, with British fantasy TV import “A Discovery of Witches” (which made its stateside debut on AMC back in 2019) sitting comfortably in the number five spot. Even the “Walking Dead” spin-off “Fear the Walking Dead” has landed in ninth place, outpacing the fourth and final season of Netflix’s homegrown comic book TV show “The Umbrella Academy.”
There’s also an AMC-backed Anne Rice adaptation occupying the number eight spot on Netflix’s top charts … although it may not be the one you’re thinking of. No, for as much as the /Film crew has sung the praises of AMC’s bloody-good (and otherwise bloody) melodrama “Interview with the Vampire” (and will no doubt continue to do so in the future), it’s actually the witches of Mayfair that are actively charting on Netflix thanks to “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches.”
The Mayfair Witches are taking over Netflix
Just as Stephen King is inseparable from Maine and you can never fully take the Philly out of Philadelphia boy M. Night Shyamalan, Anne Rice loved to spin yarns of fantastical, horrifying mayhem set in her home city of New Orleans. That extended to the late author’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches,” the ’90s Southern Gothic novel trilogy that serves as the source material for AMC’s “Mayfair Witches” series.
Created by Michelle Ashford (“Masters of Sex”) and Esta Spalding (“On Becoming a God in Central Florida”), the show stars “True Detective” and “The White Lotus” veteran Alexandra Daddario as Rowan Fielding, a successful young neurosurgeon who discovers that she is secretly the heir to a long line of powerful witches upon making her way to New Orleans. Jack Huston (“Boardwalk Empire”) co-stars as Lasher, the dark entity that has long haunted the Mayfair clan, with Tongayi Chirisa (“Another Life”) and Harry Hamlin (“Veronica Mars”) rounding out the main ensemble. “Mayfair Witches” is also part of the same small screen universe as the “Interview with the Vampire” TV series, dubbed the Immortal Universe, and the two share more than a predilection for supernatural soap operatics.
What they don’t share, however, is the favor of critics. “Mayfair Witches” season 1 only holds a 44 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and even /Film’s Danielle Ryan (an ardent “Vampire” fan) wasn’t impressed by it. As she put it in her review, “A series about a family of witches in New Orleans should be as gloriously over-the-top as the city itself, but instead of a spicy jambalaya, the series is about as flavorful as a bowl of plain steamed rice.” It’s possible that the upcoming season 2 will lean harder into the campiness of its source material (much like “Vampire” did), but will all that many folks tune in after the dismal response to season 1, even with the Netflix boost? Only the Mayfair Witches themselves can divine that one.
“Mayfair Witches” is currently streaming on Netflix.
