Lorna Green

As much as I’ve enjoyed Anne Rice’s screen adaptation of Interview With A Vampire and I’m looking forward to season 2, I can’t say the same for Mayfair Witches. Such a mega disappointment. It’s not worth wasting your time on 8 episodes. Skip this series all together. There’s nothing interesting or redeeming about it. It feels like the show runner and writers used a cheat sheet pamphlet like Magic and Daemons For Dummies. There is no originality; the storyline is just boring boring boring. Despite my slight interest in the show’s origin story of the witches coven, I’m so disheartened that it all boils down to men manipulating women and their bodies and their paranormal powers for men’s power. Blah blah blah. Characters are tropes. Dialogue is boring with too much telling and not enough fascinating showing. The lead actress is poorly miscast despite being a good crier. From the get go, I never connected with her and never rooted for her to make it even at the end. It’s not her fault that the foundation is rickety. On top of everything, this felt like it was just so old and pre-2023 by decades. Nothing relevant or timely to relate to and explore. Even the nemesis, as sexy as they wanted him to be, was drab. And the hero who can touch to discover secrets was nothing to write home about as the love-sex triangle between a white daemon, an orphaned witch and a sensitive black man with paranormal powers couldn’t even light my erotic fires to warm the cockles. I rate this a definite 5 eye rolls. Swipe left and let this series go. I don’t even think Anne Rice would’ve liked this.

This, sadly, is a disappointment not worth the $150M budget. From the script to the fx, to the diverse window dressing of people of color cast, at its core it was a shallow tepid love story that had no emotional impact, and whose politics of liberation were sucked dry. Don’t waste your time on it unless you need something to fall asleep by.

Are we seriously continuing to have this conversation about racially insensitive movies like this? Song of the South is offensive. It glosses over slavery and panders to racist stereotypes. Life for Black Americans was not fun on the plantation; it was torturous and sad and even black children were overworked, beaten, starved and sold from their parents. Disney should be ashamed of their new ride at Disneyland. I hope thousands of protestors shut it down. If you're a parent who wants to share this movie with your kids then you are obligated to tell them the truth about American slavery, that this movie is a slap in the faces of the human beings who suffered through this horrible period in our country. And if you shrug it off and let your kids watch this or go to the Disney ride then you are also responsible for miseducating your children and proliferating racism and mental illness in the United States and around the world. Do your kids a favor and read a book, go ride bikes, anything but be party to this sickness.

I was hoping for something different and compelling. Instead what I watched was slow, boring, unoriginal, and ultimately racist. I don't want to give away spoilers but why is it that when there are life and death stakes the black people are always presented as less than and unimportant to save. C'mon that's the oldest trope on the movie screen since Birth Of A Nation. The script was as dense as a piece of paper, the dialogue corny as corny can be, but I was disappointed that no one making this movie thought to break against white supremacist conventions. This is a sci fi that doesn't do anything different and doesn't challenge the status quo which is what sci fi is supposed to do. I've seen better student films on shoe string budgets. Don't waste your time watching this pathetic movie like I did. Overall, mundane acting, the screenplay was a drooler, and no, I do not need a sequel from a writer director duo who couldn't write and direct themselves out of a cave on a time loop. I give this one cave for effort and boulder-sized plotholes, and ultimately a plethora of thumbs down. For shame Netflix. You used to care about quality.