The ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Vampires Seem More Likely to Burn Out Than Fade Away
The What We Do in the Shadows franchise has been so durable that a fan might be forgiven for thinking its shows may be just as immortal as its characters. From the mockumentary feature film to its first spin-off, Wellington Paranormal, to the FX series that also uses the movie’s title, we’ve enjoyed dozens of hours’ worth of comedy in this world. Given the facts of undead life for its mostly vampire cast, less discerning creators could have potentially kept it in (bat) flight for dozens more. But said creators are discerning, and whether we’re ready or not, the sixth season will be the last. The silver (bullet) lining: What We Do in the Shadows is going out at the peak of its vampiric powers.
Previous seasons have ended on a cliffhanger, most memorably the Season Four reveal that human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) had finally run out of patience after years of brush-offs from his master, Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and bribed a friend named Derek (Chris Sandiford) to turn him into a vampire. But Season Five closed on a more definitive note. When Nandor is the last to learn of Guillermo’s deception — a huge breach of protocol for a vampire’s familiar — he resolves to kill Guillermo for the crime of dishonoring his master. Then a chance encounter with Human Actor Patton Oswalt (as himself), whom Nandor initially mistakes for Guillermo and attempts to murder, convinces Nandor that healing the relationship might be the better move. Nandor completes Guillermo’s heretofore only partial transformation into a vampire by serving him a glass of human blood, and Guillermo comes into his full power energized and eager for more.
But when Nandor and the other vampire roommates bring Guillermo on a hunt and Nandor sees that Guillermo can’t bring himself to end a human life in order to feed, Nandor confirms that Guillermo’s not vampire material after all. Nandor then kills Derek, Guillermo’s sire, changing Guillermo back into a human. Guillermo allows himself one more little deception, sneaking Derek’s corpse to the Necromancer (Benedict Wong) to revive him as a zombie. Sounds harsh, but being adopted by Topher (Haley Joel Osment) and his coterie of extremely chill undead bros is about as life-affirming a fate as a rotting brain eater could hope for.
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Determining what his destiny isn’t drives Guillermo to make some life changes in Season Six. The promise (however remote) of eternal life having been removed, there’s no point in Guillermo’s continuing to lure human meals to the vampires’ mansion, dispose of their corpses or perform any of the other distasteful chores that come with being a familiar. However, he is still codependent, so while he’s ready to move out of the shared house, he doesn’t go further than the backyard shed that Laszlo (Matt Berry) has repurposed for masturbation. Mystified by the smell, Guillermo seems to be the only one who doesn’t know Laszlo had dubbed it the Jack Shack.
With hours to fill during the day, Guillermo gets a job at his favorite restaurant, Panera. But once Guillermo is back among mortal humans in the working world, being a self-starter with a talent for patiently getting along with even the most difficult of personalities gets him access to new opportunities. Though Guillermo tries to play by the book at his new workplace, Cannon Capital, he can’t deny that interventions by Nandor and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) are instrumental in helping him climb the ladder at an incredible speed. Finance could turn out to be a perfect fit for someone with years of experience among amoral bloodsuckers. As Jordan, the big boss on Guillermo’s floor, the great Tim Heidecker is, unsurprisingly, a hilarious addition, as when he assumes a corpse Natasia has drained just overdid it on the Adderall again. And while one of the many traum-edies currently in vogue could use Guillermo’s change of career as a jumping-off point for him to meditate on whether rapacious capitalism is really that different from facilitating the exsanguinations of unwitting human victims, this show is an actual comedy, so Guillermo’s main concern about Nadja’s latest snack is getting blood out of the unsealed marble conference table.
With Guillermo returning to the human world, the vampire housemates get new hassles to deal with — or, actually, an old one. In the premiere, the vampires’ discussion about adjusting to Guillermo’s absence reminds them of their former fifth housemate, Jerry (Mike O’Brien), who went down for a “super slumber” in 1976 and asked them to wake him up on New Year’s Eve, 1996; naturally, they forgot. Though Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) had been excited to hang out with the reawakened Jerry since he was the only one who ever liked Colin, the super-slumbered Jerry is irritated to have lost nearly 50 years and can’t even remember Colin’s name. As an energy vampire, Colin relies on bad vibes for his sustenance, and the care with which producers calibrate each individual character’s specific distaste for him is a key element keeping the show fresh beyond the Gothic and supernatural tropes one expects. Showing us that Colin has signed up to drive for every rideshare service in order to drain his passengers with annoying small talk is a gag that’s brilliant in its simplicity.
The show does, of course, still truck in Gothic and supernatural tropes, too: As we know, Laszlo is a man of science, and still has worlds to discover beyond the Guillermo/animal hybrids he foisted on Staten Island last season.
The season’s first three episodes — which all air on FX on October 21st — kick things off in classic form: a little hint of mytharc with Jerry’s thirst for human conquest, which hasn’t come up much since Season One; a little bit of the vampires trying to integrate in a setting they don’t understand, as when Nandor poses as a Cannon Capital janitor, randomly waving his vacuum cleaner in the air; a very little dose of The Guide (Kristen Schaal), whom we seem to have seen less of since she became a series regular, and no, that isn’t a complaint. I did feel the third episode, “Sleep Hypnosis,” was a bit of a retread of the fourth-season episode “Private School”; I also pray that Sean’s (Anthony Atamanuik) absence from the first three episodes doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of him.
The fact that I’m even thinking in terms of lasts can’t help feeling melancholy — but such is life for the mortal human TV viewer! Hard as it will be for us to say goodbye to these characters, nothing lasts forever — for us, at least, if not for them.
