Witchcraft rules the world in Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, but the show is most electrifying when it immerses us in the everyday magic of New Orleans. In one mesmerizing scene, a young neurosurgeon named Rowan Mayfair (Alexandra Daddario) is wandering the nighttime streets during her first visit to the city when she nearly collides with a horse-drawn hearse bearing the photo of a smiling, white-haired man. Musicians and stilt walkers dressed as skeletons trail behind. Mourning has never looked so cathartic.
“No one is ever gone,” a stranger tells Rowan. “Only separated for a minute.” Reluctantly, Rowan drinks the test tube of unidentified liquid the woman buys her off a sidewalk shot girl. The second line is a ghostly blur as they join the revelers in the graveyard. This spectral wake weaves its way through the series’ third episode the way a procession might weave through the city. Rowan has flown in from San Francisco after losing her adoptive mother, discovering her own ability to kill people with her mind, and deciding to search for her biological relatives, New Orleans’ powerful Mayfair clan. In neither the city nor the family is the line between human and supernatural a bright one. “I will never forget that night of shooting,” says showrunner Esta Spalding. “You enter the land of the dead in this cemetery in the middle of” the first novel in the trilogy from which AMC’s was adapted. “That was the one where I was like, ‘We’re doing this. We’re making this thing.’”
