Stream It Or Skip It: ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ On FX, A Mockumentary About A Very Small Group Of Staten Island Vampires

The 2014 movie What We Do In The Shadows showed a group of vampires living in modern New Zealand. Five years later, Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi have taken their movie and transformed it into a series for FX — and they focus on a new group of vampires, this time on Staten Island. Will the TV version be as funny as the film?

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A nebbishy young man stares at a camera at the bottom of a creepy dual staircase. He looks at his watch and says, “It’s nightfall.”

The Gist: Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) is a “familiar” — i.e. a human slave — for a vampire named Nandor (Kayvan Novak) for the last decade. He’s wakes Nandor up when the sun goes down and makes sure no light gets into their Staten Island mansion when the sun is up. He’s coming up on his tenth work anniversary and he hopes Nandor will come through on his promise to “make me a vampire.”

Also living in the mansion are Lazlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) a vampire couple who met centuries ago in the old country, when Nadja “drained me of all my blood, giving me the curse of eternal life, thus making me a bloodthirsty creature of the night.” The couple not only have a good meet-cute story, but they like to chase each other around the mansion threatening to kill each other. You know, fun couple stuff. However, both have strayed: They both have had affairs with Baron Affanas (Doug Jones), and Nadja is fascinated with a schlub named Jeff (Jake McDorman), who looks just like a long-ago lover whose head she severed during a lovemaking session.

Finally, the fifth roomie is Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch). He just looks like a boring, normal, bald guy in a sweater-vest. But he’s really an “energy vampire”, who drains people’s energy just by his presence. He’s impervious to daylight, so he has an office job, where he bores people to death and/or annoys them with grating habits. He drones on so much that he even can drain the energy from the other vampires.

Nandor announces that the baron is coming from the old world for a rare visit. Guillermo goes to a LARPing party to get some virgins to sacrifice, while he helps Nandor buy “creepy paper” (it’s actually crepe paper). When it’s time for the baron to emerge from his coffin, he tells the group that vampires should have taken over America by now, and their ways are going to have to change.

Oh, and Nandor does make Guillermo a vampire…. In a glitter painting of the two of them.

Our Take:  I never saw the 2014 movie, written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, that inspired this series, so I’m going to have to judge this on its own merits. At the very least, though, I’m happy that Clement and Waititi are heavily involved in the TV version of What We Do In The Shadows — they are executive producers, involved in the writing, and Waititi directs a few episodes — and that they’ve assembled a top-notch team of comedy writers and directors, including Paul Simms (another EP), Tom Scharpling, Jason Woliner and more.

Because, like many shows of this type, there are a ton of big laughs, but also a lot of times where the humor either doesn’t land or a joke is taken way too far. A good for instance is in the pilot, where Lazlo and Nadja argue with Nandor about the reasons why he wants to read the letter from the Baron in the living room instead of right there in the foyer where they’re all already standing. It’s a funny bit, but stretched in order to intersperse Nadja and Lazlo’s story to the point where you just throw up your hands and say, “Ok, we get it!”

But other gags, like Nandor walking through a supermarket to find the best “creepy” paper for the Baron’s arrival, or the idea that one of the virgins has an online boyfriend she’s never met in person, are pretty spot-on funny. Further episodes will show that the Staten Island crew are living in the past a bit compared to some bigger groups of vampires.

Is the mockumentary format a bit tired? Sure. But it’s one that Clement is adept with, so we’ll see if it gets grating after a few episodes.

Sex and Skin: Besides Lazlo and Nadja’s descriptions of their relationships with the baron, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: A board that Guillermo nailed up in the attic, where the baron shares resting space with a Stairmaster, comes loose and a shaft of light hits the Baron’s coffin. Oops.

Sleeper Star: We like the random guest stars we’ll see, like McDorman as Jeff, and later, Nick Kroll as the head of the more-sophisticated Manhattan vampire group.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Oh, it opens all by itself; that’s so cool!” — Nandoor when he realizes that the baron’s coffin can open without Guillermo’s help.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you want to know about the inner thoughts of vampires living among us, then What We Do In The Shadows is the show for you.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream What We Do In The Shadows on FX