I wasn’t sure how Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches would measure up against the unholy three-ring orgy that was Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, and after finishing the pilot episode, I’m still not sure. I am, however, optimistic, as “The Witching Hour” included many of my favorite supernatural things. For one, I’m always happy to see a show taking full advantage of the high-camp aesthetics provided by the Catholic church (if I took one positive thing from seven years of Catholic school it was a deep appreciation for ceremonial melodrama). For two, it’s nice to see witch content today that gets back to the more depraved tropes of the genre. These are not Glendas or Halliwell sisters fighting the forces of evil. The Mayfairs are doing real witch shit like spawning demons (potentially) and giving mansplainers magic aneurysms. Oh yes, there is also some shoe-horned feminism which I’m choosing not to let bug me. So let’s go, gang. Who’s ready to fight the patriarchy?
Having set the appropriately spooky tone with a decrepit mansion, a wild-haired catatonic woman, and a syringe full of thorazine in the cold open, the main job of “The Witching Hour” is to set the board for the rest of the series. We follow three separate character threads that weave together by the end of the episode, the most important of which is that of our protagonist, Alexandra Daddario. (The character’s name is Rowan, and so I’ll refer to her as Rowan, but just know that in my head she will probably still be “Alexandra Daddario.”)
We first meet Rowan, brilliant pediatric surgeon and daughter of an adoptive single mother, on her boat where she lives — this is how we can tell that she’s a little bit different. She’s a doctor who chooses to live on a boat like some kind of “dropout.” (That’s the “Uber man’s” word, not mine.) But Rowan is happy on her boat. For the time being, her primary conflict is only the eternal struggle that is being a Woman at Work. For instance, Rowan has to keep her cool for the sake of her Alpha Male boss’s ego and thus her job, even when he takes over her surgery and almost kills a kid because he refused to listen to her advice. Men, amirite?
But when we interact with Dr. Keck a second time, after Rowan has learned that her beloved mother’s cancer has returned, her submissive act isn’t so successful. Rowan hopes to get her mom into a stem-cell trial that is already full by taking a part-time job as a researcher on it, and needs her boss to put in a good word for her. Instead, Keck scoffs at her request, impugns her ethics, and calls her out for the fake-meek act she’s doing. Soon he’s berating her for her “arrogance” and her unreadiness to lead “everybody” and “not just your female surgeons and mentees —” Dr. Keck’s condescending lecture is interrupted by some spooky whispering and an internal view of an artery popping somewhere in his brain and just like that, he’s on the floor.
Dr. Keck’s sudden collapse, plus her certain internal conviction that she was the one to cause it, leaves Rowan freaked, which she tries to explain to her mom over chemo. At first I was like, “Is this really the moment, Alexandria Daddario?’”And then Mom basically calls Rowan crazy, which is in itself crazy-making because Mom absolutely knows what’s going on (which we will get to in a moment). Gaslighting is frowned upon even during chemotherapy, Rowan’s mom.
Except for a brief interlude with a hot bartender who Rowan always “kicks out before breakfast,” things only get worse — for Rowan that is. For us, the viewers, we get the satisfaction of seeing her drop a second sexist prick with another supernatural jolt of well-aimed but accidental misandry. Having decided to go ahead and apply for the stem cell trial job with or without her now hospitalized boss, Rowan strikes up an immediate rapport with the research company’s insufferable head honcho, Daniel Lemle. We’re led to imagine Lemle as the type of man who magazine profiles call “charismatic” but like, he’s also wearing a pinstriped suit with a double-breasted waistcoat and he says things like, “Here at Revenia we believe that death is encoded. And if there’s a code, we can crack it! And if we can crack it, we can hack it!” Never mind that cracking a code and hacking a code mean the same thing, the point is he’s trying to make eternal life happen which is a cardinal no-no in any and all sci-fi or fantasy universes.
Rowan is doing a medium job at keeping her disdain for all the masculine douchery wafting at her as Lemle waives off any concern that working on a clinical trial in which her mother is a participant could be an ethical issue and ushers her into his office. There’s a Rodin statue in the corner, for some reason, and even more concerning, an open-plan bathroom with a urinal that Lemle uses within eyesight of his hypothetical new hire. Because he is an obvious dick, Lemle says Rowan can have the job and he can get her mom in the trial, she just has to pick one of the 30 participants already in the study to boost from a list of names.
Now, I am a practiced enough television viewer to know when I’m being serviced. Like, I am fully aware that this feminist rant Rowan launches into here was aimed squarely at me, a Brooklyn-dwelling woman in her 30s who once dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg for Halloween. Whatever. It was fun. Rowan is unimpressed by Lemle’s power play and so she calls him out for being a “small, needy man-child” who seems to think he’s just so special and dazzling that he should get to live forever and then … zap. He’s down. See? Fun!
One person in this story who does not get to enjoy a little cathartic feminist moment is Deirdre, our second-most interesting character. Well, maybe first most interesting, second-most important. Deirdre is a teenage girl living in an ambiguous time period and an environment that is by turns overwhelmingly Catholic and semi-grotesquely orgiastic. She’s first introduced in the confessional booth, naturally, where she tells the priest that she doesn’t rely on “the man” as much as she did when she was younger. At first, I worried that this was about to go to an extremely dark place, but it turns out “the man” is not a creepy neighbor or handsy uncle, he’s a not-so-imaginary friend whom she calls “Lasher” and who is clearly an analogue of Satan.
Like Rowan, Deirdre’s parents are dead, but instead of a loving mother, Deirdre lives with two aunts who are nuns in vibe if not in reality. The three live in what looks like the same moss-covered haunted house from the first scene. Somehow, Deirdre manages to sneak out from under Aunt Carlotta’s terrifying gaze and get to the lavish masquerade party hosted by Harry Hamlin, who turns out to be her Uncle Cortland. In much the same way that Aunt Carlotta is kind of like a nun but not a nun, Uncle Cortland’s party has all the aura of an orgy except that nobody is naked. This impression is not lessened when a butler-type person presents Cortland with a trio of barely post-pubescent hunks in suits like cakes on a dessert tray. “Young man,” Cortland says, addressing the floppiest-haired one in an Antebellum accent. “I have a job for you.” What kind of job? Blow? Rim? Odd?
The job turns out to be to seduce his niece, which is not what I was expecting! About midway through the act, the hand caressing Deirdre’s breast seems transformed into something demonic, and in the morning, Patrick (that’s the boy’s name) is dead.
The next we see of Deirdre, she’s nine months pregnant, which I have to assume was Cortland’s actual goal, and she’s telling the priest that Aunt Carlotta killed Patrick because Aunt Carlotta doesn’t want Deirdre to be happy. Meanwhile, in the living room, Deirdre’s other aunt is clutching rosary beads and praying about “what we may have to do” re: Deirdre’s demon spawn. Deirdre is getting desperate (understandable) and is about to attempt suicide by jumping from her balcony but is magically saved by “the man,” Lasher.
Briefly pivoting back to the A-plot, even though Rowan’s mom, a.k.a. Elena Fielding, says she has no idea who Rowan’s birth parents are or how to contact them, we also see her immediately call whatever supernatural bureaucratic headquarters Rowan came from when she confessed to zapping a misogynist the first time. This mysterious institution employs at least two people by my count. One is the middle-aged woman who answers the phone and walks with a cane. The second is the implausibly named Ciprien Grieve, who is the agent assigned to Rowan’s file. The fanciful font on Rowan’s file folder should be enough to tip you off that this is no ordinary adoption agency, but if it wasn’t, the fact that the woman treats assault-by-mind as a commonplace problem should do it.
Ciprien Grieve himself only appears once in this episode, visiting that same haunted-looking house in New Orleans and getting a magic spyglass vision of a hanged woman in a 19th century-style skirt standing beside a familiar face — Lasher. Ciprien has one cryptic and ominous phone call with Elena, who keeps asking if anything has “changed” at the house in New Orleans and mentions “the man.” Ciprien only promises that he will be the one to protect Rowan, presumably from said man.
Okay, back to Deirdre. I don’t know about you, but having seen Deirdre’s other relatives, I don’t blame her for choosing to make a deal with the devil, who has at least always been there for her. Deirdre seals her pact with Lasher by putting the skeleton key pendant necklace back on and thus becomes, in Lasher’s words, “my witch.” Time to give birth!
While Elena is dying in the present day, we see Carlotta seize Deirdre’s newborn baby the nanosecond she’s born and deliver her in a basket to a young Elena, confirming that Deirdre’s baby is, in fact, Rowan. Carlotta instructs Elena to change her name and that she will no longer be a Mayfair (she was a Mayfair?) and that this child must never learn who she is. Just minutes to go and we’ve still got one more revelation and a jump scare to go. Back on the haunted porch, the doctor hired to give the catatonic woman thorazine shots decides not to do that. Instead he whispers in her ear that he knows she is Deirdre Mayfair, and then he takes the skeleton-key necklace off and puts it in her pocket. We can only assume that this is why, in the next scene, Rowan finds Lasher standing menacingly outside her door.
