I saw it. I was there. I do not like it.
It’s a product of its time, of course, but it went on immediately after The X Files, so it could have been darker than it was, both visually and in terms of content.
They didn’t aim for a grand epic take on the level of the 1994 film version of Interview With The Vampire, but working on a lower level they could have gone gritty, and tried to before largely dropping the original viewpoint character, in part because a show about a secret society of vampires is always going to be more invested in the vampires than the humans.
(And yes, when discussing genre TV history I’m going to mention Buffy The Vampire Slayer here, which came to TV in 1997 and it and Angel have three of the nine Kindred regulars among their guest cast, as well as Brian Thompson as the second vampire to have a speaking role. And while its vampires aren’t much like the Kindred there’s at least one direct reference in the use of the term Sire. It made a series about vampires among other monsters with human viewpoint characters work, with one sympathetic vampire to begin with and a few more along the way while largely keeping them monsters.)
Executive producer Aaron Spelling is widely blamed, not least by Vampire: The Masquerade creator Mark Rein-Hagen, for bringing the glossy evening soap style from his other hits, and that certainly didn’t help. (The series creator credit goes to John Leekley, who also wrote and created a series bible for one of the unmade US versions of Doctor Who a couple of years earlier.) The gloss turned off some horror fans, and vice versa.
It still just about works as a Vampire series setup.
A lot of the changes to the source material are understandable TV decisions. Five clans in the local Camarilla is a reasonable streamlining - Vampire: The Requiem did that. The Brujah being suited mobsters and the Gangrel being sneery bikers is an odd choice but what the heck, those can be a thing. The only female Primogen member being the Toreador is a cliché, as is her running a nightclub, but hardly unusual. The Ventrue businesslike Prince as protagonist rankles this old anarch, but works as a central figure. Everybody being able to use Gangrel-specific powers works to make them seem inhuman and dangerous. The insufficiently creepy Nosferatu are the only change that really bothers me as a horror geek, and even there one of the episodes addresses it directly. Requiem and V5 have not necessarily monstrous Nosferatu as well. But I still wanted the main representative to look a lot rougher though, especially as people act like he does.
Going out in daylight - also possible for less powerful vampires in Requiem as well as Thin-Bloods in Masquerade - is easier than constant night shooting, though the idea of immunity to sunlight depending on how much blood a vampire has in their system is interesting but only really comes up once. And to be fair, it also helps with the original idea to show the Kindred from the outside as a mysterious threat where anybody could be one, something the games also sometimes play up.
“We’re all around you...”
Julian Luna, in the show credits
“They’re all around us...”
Narration for the World Of Darkness MMO trailer
I also wonder if it and some of the other choices made were to differentiate the series from Forever Knight (1992-6), the other network TV show about a vampire at the time - it ended a week after Kindred. It went a bit grittier with the protagonist as a detective mixed up in human and vampire crimes. The series had vampires that burn in sunlight and show their fangs a lot, and played up the central characters’ age with a lot of Highlander style flashbacks. (It also gets some clear shoutouts in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.) Even then, Forever Knight has a vampire femme fatale running a club called the Raven and Kindred: The Embraced has a vampire femme fatale running a club called the Haven...
The eight episodes made all feature perfectly cromulent Vampire plot hooks - a vampire falling in love and risking the Masquerade, clans feuding, a young Toreador resenting being unable to stay famous, and a Nosferatu angry about being ostracised for looking like a monster.
So if you can deal with the style, which I’d entirely understand not, you might get something from it, particularly for a chronicle about vampires in charge of a city.
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