‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Keeps Its Ending Open-Ended
Though The Simpsons keeps hanging on decade after decade as a defiant example to the contrary, scripted comedies aren’t meant to last forever. Even when a show’s premise isn’t heavily serialized, characters move toward some kind of goal, and we want them to achieve it. But what about a sitcom about characters whose stories are already hundreds of years long and could go on indefinitely? How do the producers of What We Do in the Shadows close a story about characters who have no natural end?
For most of Season Six, the answer has been “Don’t give any indication that the story is ending at all.” As has been the case for the past few years, there are a couple of storylines that give some narrative thrust through the season. In the show’s latest theft from sci-fi and sci-fantasy, Laszlo (Matt Berry) has used pieces from several corpses to create Cravensworth’s Monster (Andy Assaf), insisting whenever anyone brings it up that he doesn’t know what Frankenstein is. Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) has been trying to make friends with the Monster, seeking the affirmation he didn’t get from Jerry (Mike O’Brien) after Colin and the other housemates belatedly woke Jerry from a decades-long “super slumber.” (Jerry gasses on so much about vampires conquering the humans of the New World that an object lesson eventually has to be made of him by elders in the community.) Having determined in Season Five that vampirism wasn’t for him, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) drifts into high finance at Cannon Capital. It’s an easy transition, since the company works in the Asian markets and thus keeps vampire hours. This also permits Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Guillermo’s former master Nandor (Kayvan Novak) to join Guillermo; working fake jobs at Cannon Capital allows them to contrive ways of pushing Guillermo up the ladder of success — or so they believe, anyway.
Around what passes for mytharc material on this very silly show, we’ve had Monsters of the Week: shapeshifters next door (who, to us, appear to be guests at the neighbor’s Airbnb); homages to The Warriors, True Detective and New York-based crime procedurals; and a visit from the ghost of Laszlo’s scoundrel of a father. But in classic sitcom style, none of these adventures results in changes to anyone’s perspective on the world. The vampires are who they are — immortally and eternally.
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What the show has not done (in the shadows) is drive toward resolution on any old business — and, given the characters involved, some of that business is very old. Season Five closed with Derek (Chris Sandiford), the vampire who sired Guillermo and then got killed in order to turn Guillermo back into a human, being reanimated as a zombie and joining Topher (Haley Joel Osment) and his crew; no further amends are to be made for him, apparently. Laszlo’s nemesis Simon The Devious (Nick Kroll) apparently took his final revenge on the housemates in “Go Flip Yourself” two seasons ago, because we haven’t seen him since. And if it’s been hard, over Season Six, to take seriously Nandor’s crush on The Guide (Kristen Schaal), we’re not getting any declarations of love between Nandor and Guillermo instead.
I can’t say whether the muted series finale here is a repudiation of goopy and protracted TV farewells, or a capper belatedly added onto a regular season that, in the 10th episode where things would normally end, opened the door for Nandor and Guillermo to become vigilante crime fighters in a possible Season Seven; I’m not privy to which decisions were made when. Regardless: we’re told that the documentary crew that’s been filming the vampire housemates for the past several years has shot enough footage, so they abruptly announce that they’re heading out. The vampires all greet this news with a shrug, having gone through so many goodbyes by now that another one barely registers. Besides which, as Nadja notes, Guillermo’s vampire epiphany last season would have been an artful place to have stopped. Only Guillermo is unprepared and panicky, and Nadja thinks she knows why. Every time something ends for a human, it gives them a tiny preview of the end of their life. (Puts those over-the-top send-offs for SNL cast members into a whole new light when you think of them that way, doesn’t it!)
No one is especially empathetic about Guillermo’s stress — Nadja says that filming him as though he were as significant as the vampires made him feel an unearned sense of importance, like when you put a raincoat on a dog — but they try to fake the feeling that the moment is, you know, momentous. But the truth is, as much as we may miss the show when it doesn’t come back next year, the franchise seems nearly as deathless as the characters it documents.
What We Do in the Shadows started as a feature film. Two sitcoms — this one and its New Zealand-based predecessor Wellington Paranormal — have followed. Particularly in our era of IP metastasis, it’s easy to imagine What We Do in the Shadows continuing in some form. So many threads might have been left untied because, like the show’s documentary crew, FX put the production on a clock that didn’t permit a more definitive ending. But maybe this hasn’t ever been a franchise about definitive endings; it certainly hasn’t been for most of its characters.
As for Guillermo, the one who does have a definitive ending somewhere in his future, the way forward for him is somewhere between the advice of his housemates. Colin Robinson tells him, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Nandor tells him, “Stop being a little bitch.”
There’s probably a lesson here for us to take, too.
