What We Do in the Shadows, review: absurdist vamp-com is still bloody good fun
There is one very good joke in What We Do in the Shadows (BBC Two), a modern-day vampire comedy now returned for a second series. Nandor, Nadja and Laszlo are your regular vampires - black cloaks, lashings of eyeliner, look as if they’re off to a re-enactment weekend in Whitby.
But Colin is a beige, bespectacled, middle-aged man who tries his best to bore everyone to death. He’s an energy vampire, geddit? (I do feel sorry for people called Colin, which has become a byword for dull. Are you a sexy and dynamic Colin? Reclaim your name!)
This mockumentary-style sitcom is based on the 2014 film of the same name from Jemaine Clement (co-creator of the much-missed Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit). The vampires have formed a colony on Staten Island and are attempting to live together in domestic harmony.
Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Laszlo (Matt Berry) are your average married vampire couple. Nandor (Kayvan Novak), is a houseproud former warlord from the days of the Ottoman Empire: “Not naming names, but I’ve recently noticed that the house reeks of decaying flesh and there are dead birds everywhere.”
Nandor has a loyal familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who spends the series hiding the fact he’s a vampire slayer descended from Van Helsing, while secretly killing the vampire assassins who keep coming to the door. He does it all wearing a fetching Fair Isle jumper. The first episode also had a fun cameo from Haley Joel Osment, now in his 30s but an actor doomed to be known forever as the kid from The Sixth Sense.
It feels slight but at times wonderfully absurd, from the little details - Benedict Wong staying committed to his Lancashire accent while playing a necromancer - to the rules of this vampire universe, as when Laszlo dismissed Nadja’s beliefs in the supernatural: “There’s no such thing as ghosts. My wife comes from the kind of town that believes in all this superstitious nonsense. She also thinks goblins are real.” Nandor agrees: “Ghosts are made up for kids, so they might sleep more peacefully.”
Later, the ghost of Nandor’s horse turns up. “John and I were inseparable,” he says sadly. “But eventually I had to eat him.” It isn’t laugh-out-loud comedy, but it’s satisfyingly silly.