Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Reginald The Vampire’ On Hulu, Where A Big Guy Becomes A Vampire And Still Has To Deal With Fat-Shaming From Skinny Vampires

How come we never see chubby vampires? It seemed that no one has ever pointed out that vampires are usually thin, vain and fashionable. But Johnny B. Truant imagined what being a vampire with a lumpy body would be like, in his appropriately-titled novel series Fat Vampire. Now, his vampire-for-the-rest-of-us character Reginald Andres is getting his own Syfy show, complete with his name in the tile.

REGINALD THE VAMPIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A handsome man stands outside a nightclub. He puts a wooden pick through his hair.

The Gist: The man waits for an expensive car to pull up, and the guy in it kicks a woman out and curses at her. That’s the handsome man’s cue; he gets in it, tells the guy off, bares his fangs and chomps on the guy’s neck. Yes, Maurice Miller (Mandela Van Peebles) is a vampire.

Meanwhile, Reginald Andres (Jacob Batalon) is pretending to be a motivational speaker to psych himself up for his evening shift at the Slushy Shack. When he gets there, his douchey coworker Todd (Aren Buchholz) pokes fun of Reginald’s weight, as usual, and Reginald crushes on another coworker, Sarah Kinney (Em Haine).

Maurice comes into the Slushy Shack, and he seems familiar to Reginald. As he takes the garbage out at the end of another rough shift, Maurice, who’s been stalking his next feed, strikes up a conversation. As vampires do, he draws Reginald into a trance and compels him to have the confidence to ask Sarah out, which he does and gets a very surprising yes.

Reginald wants Maurice to pump him up for his first date ever (really). So they meet at a bar an hour beforehand, but Maurice’s night gets derailed when he gets a visit from 4 fellow vampires — all of whom are skinny and pretty. He goes to deal with it, but the two hot female vampires get to Reginald. To save him, Maurice gets Reginald’s permission to do a procedure where Reginald drinks Maurice’s blood.

That’s right: Reginald wakes up and he’s now a vampire, who won’t age and is mostly immortal. But the problem is that he’s stuck in the body he dies in, and Maurice tells Reginald that his rotund form won’t go over well with his fellow vampires. But he has super speed and can heal quickly. He just can’t be in the sun. On his first night, Reginald goes back to work and all he can do is see the bulging veins of Todd and Sarah, who is wondering why he ghosted her on their date night. Maurice tells Reginald that he has to feed, even if it’s just a sip, else that’s how he’ll see everyone.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on the Fat Vampire novel series by Johnny B. Truant, Reginald The Vampire is closer to What We Do In The Shadows than Interview With The Vampire on the scary scale.

Our Take: We love the idea behind Reginald The Vampire. Reginald has lived his life wanting the things that most young people want: To have fun, to date, to fall in love. But he’s had to fight off fat shamers his entire life, leaving him with less than zero self esteem. So life as an accidental vampire is going to be tough for him. He loves how handsome and confident most vampires are, but hates that he’s not stuck for eternity in his lumpy body. But it does seem like, with Maurice there to train him, becoming a bloodsucker might be the best thing to happen to him.

The fact that we’re so unsure of that at the end of the first episode is what has us intrigued. We do think that as we find out more about Reginald’s story, and also Maurice’s, some more character-based funny stuff will come out; the first episode is more heartfelt than hilarious, but there’s enough of the former for us to forgive the lack of the latter.

We also want to see more of Maurice’s story. We get a flashback 50 years, when he was a Black Panther in Oakland and fell under the spell (literally) of his friend Angela (Savannah Basley). We do see that Angela hasn’t left Maurice’s life completely, and that there’s a reason why the pretty vampires are after Maurice.

But the main story is going to be about how Reginald figures out how to be a vampire, and how to feed on people when he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. In that way, the tone is similar to iZombie, where another undead type has to live everyday life despite those undead urges to consume human entrails. We want to see how he and Sarah work out, and how he battles the now-larger group of fat-shaming bullies around him, with these having the super strength and speed he now has.

Sex and Skin: None, but there seem to be a whole lot of f-bombs for a basic cable show.

Parting Shot: Sarah shows up at Reginald’s apartment and tells him she’s been crushing on him as hard as he has been on her. He swallows hard, and when she comes in, he turns around and bares his fangs, with a very worried look on his face.

Sleeper Star: It looks like Em Haine’s character Sarah is going to be more than just an unattainable crush for Reginald. She may even be an ally once she learns the truth about him and they start dating for real.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m a motherfucking vampire!” Reginald says when his new reality dawns on him.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stories about vampires aren’t exactly feelgood tales. But it seems that’s the direction Reginald The Vampire is going in. And that really makes us want to root for humble Reginald to get at least some of what he wants out of life.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.