‘What We Do in the Shadows’ raises stakes
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 returned for its third season Thursday 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,” Mark Proksch, who plays energy vampire Colin Robinson, told the Daily News. “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 humor 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 savior and maybe doom, the vampires have locked Guillermo in a cage in the basement.
“He’s still loyal to them. He just killed a theater full of vampires to save their lives and all they say is, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re a vampire slayer, let’s put him in prison,’” Guillen, 31, told The News.
“They don’t see that I did this for you, you’re my chosen family even though it’s a toxic relationship. These are the people that I love to be around and they don’t see that. At the end of the day, Guillermo is human and he’s driven by emotions, so he’s going to be loyal to what his heart tells him.”
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 42year-old British actor who plays Nandor the Relentless, the former Ottoman leader.
Nandor tries to rebound by dating, but, like almost everything he does, it implodes almost immediately, starting with an absolutely fumbled attempt with the receptionist at his gym.
“Dating in the 21st century is complicated enough, and I guess for a 400-yearold vampire, you’d think that he’d have enough practice by now, but he seems just as clueless as I was when I was 16,” Novak laughed.