Talamasca: The Secret Order

The Bureaucracy of the Damned

The part of any supernatural universe that usually interests me most is the paperwork. Forget the seduction, the blood, the moody stares for a second. If vampires and witches are truly roaming around New York City, somebody has to log incidents, hide evidence, and mop up the administrative fallout. That’s the basic appeal of *Talamasca: The Secret Order*, AMC’s latest attempt to widen the Anne Rice TV universe.

Created by John Lee Hancock, this six-episode run swaps the humid gothic melodrama of *Interview with the Vampire* for something much closer to a John le Carré spy story. The Talamasca is a secretive organization that watches the supernatural with the cautious, exhausted paranoia of MI6. The audience comes in through Guy Anatole, played by Nicholas Denton, a fresh law school graduate who can read minds. He doesn’t experience that ability as a blessing. To him it’s more like a neurological affliction, bad enough that he medicates himself just to get through a grocery run without drowning in everyone else’s thoughts.



Denton gives Guy a permanent, tight-wound flinch. He moves like somebody half-expecting a car to jump the curb and take him out. When Helen (Elizabeth McGovern), a seasoned Talamasca operative, corners him in the street and explains that his whole life has been under observation, the obvious reaction would be panic. What Denton shows instead is relief. His jaw loosens. His face goes slack. For the first time, someone is telling him the truth. McGovern, meanwhile, looks like she’s having a great time playing the kindly handler whose smile never fully masks the calculation behind it.

I’m not convinced the series always benefits from becoming such a straight-faced procedural. Hancock clearly enjoys placing the supernatural inside beige offices and surveillance vans, and early on that gives the show a pleasantly *X-Files*-ish texture. But the middle episodes can bog down badly once the story starts chasing a missing artifact through long patches of exposition. More than once I found myself wishing a vampire would smash through a window just to wake things up. The six-episode structure creates a funny imbalance: the pilot takes its time, then by episode five the story is sprinting to get all its pieces into place.



Things get markedly better whenever William Fichtner enters the frame. He plays Jasper, a being who has more or less commandeered the London Talamasca office for motives that remain stubbornly his own. Fichtner has one of those faces that seems made to conceal ten different agendas, and he uses it well here. He moves with the careful stiffness of something old and very tired. *TheWrap*’s David Gennard put it well when he said the show "sparks to life" during scenes between Jasper and Guy, creating an alliance charged with "tenderness amidst their allure but also mutual manipulation."

They really are the anchor of the back half. In episode four, there’s a long conversation between them that strips away the cluttered spy plotting and leaves the show with something cleaner and sadder: two wounded people talking honestly about emptiness. Guy begins to understand that the so-called monsters he is assigned to monitor are often more straightforward about their grief than the human employers writing his checks.



Whether that emotional thread is strong enough to carry a second season will depend on how much patience you have for procedural gears turning. *Talamasca* doesn’t have the grand, operatic sweep of its vampire cousins. It prefers the murkier middle ground of surveillance, secrecy, and compromised loyalties. It’s a show about people standing just outside the supernatural storm, convincing themselves they’re only observers right up until they step too close.