Stream It Or Skip It: ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Season 4 On FX/Hulu, Where The Kooky Bloodsuckers Return For A Fourth Season Of Toothy Laughs

By now, What We Do in the Shadows (Hulu/FX) seems to have outlived its source material, Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 movie of the same name. It has its own history, its own in-jokes, its own mythology. And while Clement and Waititi are listed as executive producers, Stefani Robinson (Atlanta) and Paul Simms (NewsRadio) that handle writing duties in the first episode of the fourth season, where the gang’s back together but for at least one bizarro wrinkle in the area of energy vampires.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s been a year since the vampires parted ways. Outside their Staten Island mansion, rain piddles down as packages lie piled up and mildewed on the porch. The “documentary” camera pushes through the front door.

The Gist: With Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou) still in London as an attache to the Supreme Vampire Council, and Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) on his worldwide jaunt, upkeep at the Residence has suffered while Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry) looks after “Boy” (Mark Proksch), the toddler-like individual with the head and features of Colin Robinson that crawled out of the deceased energy vampire’s carcass at the end of What We Do in the Shadows season 3. “Boy,” because as far as Laszlo is concerned, this is decidedly not Colin Robinson. How could that be? He bops around the creaky old house with a candle on his forehead. Plus, he’s not even boring, as Laszlo’s exhaustive tests have proved, occurring as they have between bouts of swordsmanship, home improvement, woodworking, perfecting the fine art of conversation, and electroshock therapy.

When Nadja suddenly reappears, complete with her doppelganger-as-doll sidekick, followed on her heels by Nando, there’s much to talk about. Like how bored Nadja was at the Council, stuck on a vampire economic planning subcommittee. Or how Nandor made it as far as Fresno and did some sightseeing with a family of normies from Green Bay, Wisconsin before lighting out for his ancestral homeland on a container ship, which due to his draining of the crew got stuck sideways in the Suez Canal. And it turns out that what Laszlo had diagnosed as bad piping was actually Nandor’s familiar Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillen), banging on the inside of his shipping container as it lay in the foyer.

Everyone is surprised to see the child-like-Colin Robinson-who-is-not-Colin Robinson, and they go about probing him to recover the pin number to Colin Robinson’s ATM card. The vampires are running low on cash, and back when he wasn’t dead, Colin Robinson had always handled house finances. Nadja, however, has a revenue-generating idea of her own. What about a vampire nightclub? “Like in the film Blade, with blood sprinklers and a live S&M show.” The others are wary, but Nandor’s idea to rob Henry Ford isn’t feasible, and besides, a nightclub is a cash-rich business. Now all they’ve got to do is convince the Guide (Kristen Schaal), whose lair at the Vampire Council is the perfect venue.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Since we last saw these vampires, What We Do in the Shadows executive producer Taika Waititi has surfaced as Blackbeard on the HBO Max pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, which he also produces. And there’s a similar quality to the loopiness that defines the chatter in the Vampire Residence over on the CBS sitcom Ghosts, which will drop its second season this September.

Our Take: “I need to start looking out for number one,” Guillermo says shortly after emerging from his shipping container. And that means a little Guillermo time, for once, after years of sacrifice and subservience and vampiric bodyguarding. But looking after number one will have to wait until after he serves as Nandor’s best man. Yes, what might turn out to be the most hilarious development of What We Do in the Shadows Season 4 is the upcoming nuptials of the house’s oldest resident. Who’s the lucky lady? Well, Nandor hasn’t figured that out yet.

A bloodthirsty, socially inept, culturally-insensitive vampire looking for love in all the wrong places is just the kind of storyline a show like Shadows can really sink its teeth into, and proves that this bunch hasn’t lost an absurdist step since season 3. Figure in Laszlo’s obsession with the twin hosts of a home improvement show called Go Flip Yourself (is that the Sklar Brothers?), boring energy vamp Colin Robinson’s sideways reincarnation as a man baby, and Nadja’s determination to open up a nightclub, and there’s plenty of material here to fill the breezy half-hour episodes of What We Do in the Shadows, where bits ricochet wildly off crown molding and claw foot furniture.

Sex and Skin: With Nadja’s return from London, there’s one thing on Laszlo’s mind, and the shtupping commences in the drawing room as Nando recounts his own travels. Even when the vigor of their lovemaking causes the settee to crash through the floorboards into the sewage pool below, they continue undeterred, for it’s as Nadja said. “I want to peel you like a potato and mash your insides!”

Parting Shot: Nadja is not gonna take the fact of her vampiric nightclub concept getting buried in committee at the Supreme Worldwide Vampiric Council lying down in her coffin. “We are opening a vampire night club,” she says, her voice rising tremulously. “And if any of you motherfuckers get in my way” – now she’s shrieking, and the lamps are shattering – “you will surely live to regret it!”

Sleeper Star: Like the rangy mansions of the Addams Family or Munsters before it, the Vampire Residence is a claptrap funhouse full of sight gags and lifestyle detritus. For season 4, that includes stacks of discarded shipping crates blocking most hallway doors, a nursery of raccoons living in the library, the walls full of gaping holes from Laszlo’s misguided sledgehammering, and sudden gaps in the floorboards leading to the oozing sewage below.

Most Pilot-y Line: “How could you ship me in a wooden crate across the Atlantic TWICE?!” Of all the main characters’ re-introductions after their year apart, Guillermo de la Cruz climbing out his shipping crate and clawing for a shred of exasperated dignity is certainly the funniest.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Whether you’re into vampires or not, What We Do in the Shadows remains laugh-out-loud funny from moment to its next absurd moment, and only stands to make gains in that department going forward to its fourth season.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges