Anne Rice's Immortal Universe
AMC was launching a new connected universe based on two iconic Anne Rice book series: The Vampire Chronicles and The Lives of the Mayfair Witches. I built a comprehensive guide to Rice's canon and a map for how the pieces fit together.
A unique, iconoclastic universe
AMC Networks acquired eighteen Anne Rice novels and began developing multiple concurrent TV series, starting with Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches. But the world of Anne Rice doesn't work on the same principles of other franchises. With books spanning fifty years, full of contradictions and shifting protagonists, from an author who prioritized passion, immediacy, and evolving obsessions over consistent continuity, the task of translating these beloved stories into a modern connected franchise was enormous.
Mapping a sprawling franchise
My job was to build a map, to provide the producers with a guide to everything contained in the vast, sprawling corpus. That meant understanding not just the stories, but the fandom, the controversies, and the emotional stakes for lifelong readers who had been waiting decades to see these characters come to life again.
I created a vast, comprehensive internal database, a guide to the entire combined Vampire Chronicles/Mayfair Witches storyworld. If printed as a book, it would be eight hundred pages long and over three-hundred thousand words. This franchise bible covered the storylines, characters, lore, locations, and timelines across all eighteen books, highlighting the continuities and contradictions and charting recurring themes. It also explored franchise strategies, comparing and contrasting with other large media universes, unearthing historical fan reactions and fault lines, and contained a master timeline charting how Rice's vampires, witches, and immortal spirits interacted with all of recorded human history.
Beyond documentation, I advised producers and network executives on how to handle lore, manage fan expectations, and navigate the particular sensitivity around adapting an IP with an intensely loyal, encyclopedically knowledgeable fanbase. I also developed a slate of multiplatform tie-in projects, including the forthcoming companion digital series The Night Island.
A universe with room to grow
Interview with the Vampire has become one of the network's most acclaimed prestige dramas and a fandom sensation. Mayfair Witches launched successfully, shortly followed by a third series, Talamasca: The Secret Order. The multiplatform content strategy, including the digital series The Night Island, remains in active development, and the Immortal Universe is still expanding.
This is the kind of franchise IP work I love, figuring out how to preserve what fans love while finding ways to do something new with it.