On the side of the road in Toronto, just past Yorkville Village’s tony shopping thoroughfare, is Staten Island’s ugliest house. If you time it just right, you might be able to pass the dilapidated monstrosity as a coven of vampires are being flung through the air, bouncing off the house’s aging siding as they engage in violent combat with a coterie of demons, werewolves, and fellow bloodsuckers. This past year, if you were lucky, you might even have witnessed the most unusual, borderline-disturbing kickoff to a Pride Parade there’s ever been, taking place right there on that lawn.
It’s fitting that the outdoor set for the FX comedy What We Do in the Shadows—the decrepit Victorian structure where four vampires and a creepy doll inhabited by one of their ghosts live—is so mundanely just…there in the Canadian city. Now in its fifth season, with new episodes airing Thursdays, the Emmy-winning series follows the undead clan as they attempt to blend in with the New York City borough where they’ve lived for the past century. It’s a fool’s errand, considering the quartet’s raunchy, uninhibited instincts and their obtuse lack of self-awareness (not to mention that they are dressed like obvious vampires). Then again, these people are nothing if not fools—fools with supernatural powers.
Spun off from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 film of the same name, What We Do in the Shadows is filmed as a The Office-style mockumentary, infusing the ordinariness of everyday life with the outrageousness of vampiric quirks.
An episode may, for example, feature energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch) suffering a gruesome death and being reborn as a baby with a grown man’s face, vampire Laszlo (Matt Berry) making topiary sculptures of vulvas in the garden, or Laszlo and Nandor (Kayvan Novak) facing off against—and killing—the actual Jersey Devil while on a trip to the Pine Barrens. Another finds Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) shopping for dresses for the doll version of herself at a Staten Island mall’s Build-a-Bear. Then there are episodes like the one in which the group thinks they’re invited to a party for a neighbor’s unveiling of his “Superb Owl”—only to learn about something unfamiliar (and comparatively boring) called the Super Bowl.
The result is a series routinely assigned variations of the superlative “the funniest show on TV.” It’s been nominated twice for Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys and the Critics Choice Awards, is currently nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy at the Television Critics Association Awards, and was The Daily Beast’s Obsessed choice for the and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
