No Basement

By Andrea E. Menzies 01/29/23

Internet Rant of the week and Podcast Cross Promotion: New Orleans has NO basements! This rant is not MY rant alone as the book series became a cable TV show. The show has changed MUCH of the books to bring them to film. Some of this is a necessary evil in that TV and books are NOT the same publication format. Yet many of the changes are melodramatic and strangely contradicting the book plot. Why BUY the rights of a a bestselling book if you are going to mutilate it into an unrecognizable format? So far they have cut the characters Michael Curry and Aaron Lightener completely and they are MAIN characters. Making the Talamasca character of Aaron young destroys the Van Helsing metaphors from the original Dracula book inherent to that character. Then the drama goes wild as they have a nurse go into a basement and get killed. This is NOT in the books! In fact ALL the cemeteries in New Orleans are ABOVE ground because the soil will let NOTHING be constructed underground! The photo I have attached is an above ground cemetery I photographed in New Orleans in 2019. It is a famous tourist fact announced on all tours! Which begs the question why did they put people who know NOTHING about New Orleans in charge of a famously New Orleans based story that was a best seller book? Almost every book podcast I read or heard went wild on that point: New Orleans has NO Basements. They are filming in New Orleans but have much to learn. It is strange like as if they went to Paris and said the Eiffel Tower did NOT exist. I hope they do better next week, but I still like the show and podcast “The AMC Mayfair Witches Podcast” online. They mentioned the uncle character IS played by the Perseus actor from Clash of the Titans, and that alone is worth a listen to the podcast as they do a snake dance that is super funny.