Vampire comedy raises the stakes in third season
In the depths of Staten Island, a group of culturally out-of-touch roommates are struggling to find their place in 2021. These guys just happen to be vampires.
What We Do in the Shadows, which has returned for its third season on FX, has continued gaining fans as the vampire comedy has chugged along, first as a critical darling and then as a pandemic binge watch.
“It’s the type of show that you can just pick up,” said Mark Proksch, who plays energy vampire Colin Robinson “This isn’t Dostoevsky. It’s just a silly vampire comedy and I think that’s easy for people to get into.”
The premise — four vampires hiding among the mortals and their familiar (a human servant) — is, as Proksch said, simple enough. It’s the cohesive humour
of the stars Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, Harvey Guillen and Proksch that have made What We Do in the Shadows a hit.
And the storylines just keep getting bigger and more ridiculous.
“I think [the writers are] seeing that we are basically cartoon characters and because the
world is a world of fantasy, the rules of, say, Big Bang Theory or Roseanne don’t apply. They’re not tethered to reality,” Proksch, 43, said. “That’s something that evolves a little bit. Each season, they realize: ‘Oh, this very, very silly ridiculous plotline will work in this world.”
The third season picks up almost immediately after the second, when the vampires’ familiar, Guillermo (Guillen), accidentally outed himself as a vampire slayer, off the same family tree as Van Helsing, by taking out the entire tri-state contingent of vampires trying to kill Nandor (Novak), Laszlo (Berry), Nadja (Demetriou) and Colin (Proksch). Completely lost as to how to handle their newfound saviour and maybe doom, the vampires have locked Guillermo in a cage in the basement.
While Laszlo, Nadja and Colin are varying degrees of gleeful and terrified of Guillermo’s imprisonment, Nandor, simply, is lonely.
“He lost his sidekick, in a way, because his sidekick turned out to be an ancestor of Van Helsing and an ass-kicking vampire slayer and that’s kind of messed with his head a little bit,” said Novak, the 42-year-old British actor who plays Nandor the Relentless, the former Ottoman leader.
There are overarching plots and recurring jokes — the vampires’ new position at the Vampiric Council, Colin’s midlife crisis as he approaches his 100th birthday, Laszlo and Nadja’s bizarre relationship — and new journeys, some figurative, some a literal trip to Atlantic City. As What We Do in the Shadows continues to grow, the balance becomes figuring out what fans love and maintaining its quirky, off-kilter humour.
“I know what [the fans] want: Jackie Daytona,” Novak joked, slipping into Nandor’s accent as he called back to Laszlo’s undercover bar owner from the second season.
“But they ain’t getting it. They’re getting more Nandor, all right? He wants the woman and the love and the relationship and the romance. F— Jackie Daytona.”