Vampires and television have had a long relationship.

It arguably all started with the almost-200-year-old Barnabas Collins evolving from a side villain into the de facto protagonist on the 1960s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.

From there, the small screen was relatively quiet until the late 1990s, when the travails of a teenaged vampire slayer forever changed a certain subset of Millennials (yes, I’m talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and also the spinoff, Angel).

Flash forward a few years to 2008, and that same subset of Millennials (it’s me, I am that Millennial) found solace in the first few seasons of HBO’s True Blood. And in more recent history, there’s been the delicious comedy What We Do in the Shadows, which ended in 2024.

And, of course, there’s also Interview with the Vampire, which had an immaculately fucked up third season this year under a new name, The Vampire Lestat.

Over at CBS, there will be another vampire show hitting the small screen in 2026. This one has VERY different vibes than Lestat: it’s a family comedy, but it also differs from What We Do in the Shadows in that it’s a multi-cam sitcom that — according to co-creator Joe Port at a CBS Press Day event — is a “very relatable show” about love, marriage, and family.  

That series is called Eternally Yours, and Port wrote the pilot over 12 years ago with co-creator Joe Wiseman. The script was firmly in the reject drawer (it even had an episode on Dead Pilots Society in 2020, a podcast that acts out pilots that never get made) until the two’s popularity with another supernatural CBS sitcom, Ghosts, caused the studio to greenlight it.  

The series, according to Port, is inspired by his long-time friendship and business partnership with Wiseman. As such, he said a show about people “who get on each other's nerves, but who love each other.”

That makes sense given the series’ premise. It centers on the vampiric couple Charles (Ed Weeks) and Liz (Allegra Edwards), whose burning-hot romance has crumbled into a tepid marriage after 500 years together. They live in Seattle with their expanded coven, and the show’s inciting incident, as the official synopsis explains, involves their daughter’s human boyfriend unexpectedly entering their lives and forcing them “to confront whether their love can survive forever… or if forever is a life sentence.”

The show looks fun and little bit silly (complementary), with the vampire-ness of it all played for laughs. But at its core, the sitcom is about relationships and what it means to be human. A premise that, for all the two shows’ differences, is not dissimilar to a theme in the other vampire series currently running.

Interview with a Vampire/The Vampire Lestat (which will be called Queen of the Damned in its upcoming fourth season) is an AMC drama that goes about as dark as a show can get. To give a taste of that, Sam Reid, who plays the tortured and recklessly flamboyant Lestat, said at a Television Critics Association (TCA) press conference earlier this year that his character is “crawling out of the grave while it’s being shoveled full of dirt.”

The Lestat season is bombastic, with its titular character seducing us into his over-the-top, off-the-wall, orgiastic life. But as the season progresses, it gets darker and darker as we learn more about the trauma Lestat endured as a child and his early days as a vampire.

Reid’s co-star Jacob Anderson, who plays Luis, the vampire focused on in the first two seasons of the show who is (I’d argue) Lestat’s great love, called out at the same TCA event how the show delves into the humanity of its immortal characters. Luis and Lestat, he said, are “the most human once they become vampires… in their human existence [they] didn't ever quite do the processing and now they have to just live with themselves forever.”

“We explore who these people were as human beings, there is a lot of unanswered complexity,” Reid added. “And then when you add on an immortal layer, all of the humanity and the issues that surrounded their life, and that kind of drove their life to certain points, are amplified.”

On The Vampire Lestat, that exploration is tragic and bloody and soul wrenching. On Eternally Yours, it’s funny, sweet, and fun. Both depictions hold truth about humanity and reflect the complexity of our mortal lives.

Eternally Yours premieres Thursday, October 8, 2026, at 8:30 p.m. on CBS and Paramount+. The first three seasons of Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat are streaming on AMC+ and you should go (re)watch them.