Tim Spross is a writer based in New York City. He believes storytelling allows us to live multiple lives and supercharges an empathy for different perspectives and cultures. He is especially interested in how cinema and stories relate with dreams, the subconscious, and our innate desire for myths. Tim is attracted to The Hollywood Insider’s mission to spread positivity, education, and dialogue through its publication, and he wants to explore ideas together with its readers, helping himself and others to develop new perspectives.
Nov 10, 2024
Table of Contents
Starting this past Monday, ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ is back with a final sixth season on FX and Hulu. The first three episodes aired on Monday, October 21st, and each new episode will be released weekly on Mondays up until December 16th, 2024, for a total of 11 episodes. The episodes will be available to stream the next day on Hulu.
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ is a mockumentary-style comedy series about a household of vampires living in a gothic mansion in Staten Island, originally coming to the New World with the intention of conquering it. Four vampires live together as roommates, including the formerly terrible but now docile Nandor the Relentless (played by Kayvan Novak), the hot-tempered and overly-sex-concerned Laszlo (played by Matt Berry), the wistful Nadja (played by Natasia Demetriou), and an energy vampire by the name of Colin Robinson (played by Mark Proksch).
It’s the vampires dealing with bureaucracy, their human companion Guillermo (played by Harvey Guillén), and other oddball characters (vampires and humans alike, even the actor Patton Oswalt as himself in the fifth season) that provides the series with its comedy.
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ the TV show is a successor to the 2014 film of the same name, starring Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. If you haven’t watched the film, in my opinion it’s one of the best comedy mockumentary films ever made, and it did a lot of work to establish the TV series norms, it’s tone, style, and supernatural world. I would actually recommend watching the film first, because it has a certain mundane charm with its more everyday characters, Stu and Nick for example, and because of its short contained storyline.
How Season 6 Begins
If you haven’t watched previous seasons, the series does not strictly follow a thread recurring from season to season. So it’s possible to drop into any season and begin watching. What is of frequent concern is the development of the human companion character Guillermo, who struggles with wanting to be a vampire and at the same time having a vampire-hunting ancestry. But like a lot of more episodic comedies, the series weaves in out of this arc pretty loosely.
Season 6 begins with Guillermo having reneged on his desire to become a vampire (having become one in season 5 and then reverting back to humanity). Guillermo has instead embraced the mundane life of working at a Panera Bread and just being friends with his vampire housemates.
At the start of this final season, the vampires of Staten Island have mostly forgotten about their desire to conquer the New World, and this is brought to us as a reminder in the new character, Jerry the Vampire (played by Mike O’brien), awoken after fifty years asleep.
I think it’s safe speculation that Jerry the Vampire will prove to be a frequent foil in this season, reminding the vampires of how they have changed and whether they truly want to conquer humanity after all. By the end of the episode, it’s clear that the main cast of vampires are content with their lives and hobbies as is. Perhaps, they’ve grown from older, more sadistic desires of subjugating the humans, to wanting to live more quotidian, self-fulfilling lives. I’m excited to see that theme and tension explored more.
Frankly, the first episode with the introduction of Jerry was a let down. The upside however is that the second and third episodes were a return to form, and included several good gags and interesting and novel plot threads.
I’m a joke guy, so I will start with the comedy first. There weren’t any jokes that landed especially hard or felt novel to me in the first episode, other than perhaps the way Matt Berry reads lines when his character insists he doesn’t know who Dr. Frankenstein is (you could fill an episode of Matt Berry just reading lines and I would watch it). Otherwise, Jerry forgetting Colin’s name repeatedly isn’t memorable enough comedic choices in this day and age for scripted shows, as were a few other gags. I felt like Jerry awaking after fifty years of sleep was a comedic situation they could have mined better.
Nonetheless, Jerry the Vampire, with his mixture of menace and cultural adaptability (he ironically seems much less frozen in time compared to the other vampires), might prove to be an interesting antagonist for the other vampires in the final season. I expect we will be seeing more of him.
The second episode features Guillermo much more prominently, who through good fortune starts a job at a private equity firm in the mailroom. Guillermo, Nadja, and Nandor contrasting with mundane and bro-ey finance world is a fun dynamic. It’s also nice to see Guillermo having some real world success and seeing his social aptitude on display.
Meanwhile, in the second episode Laszlo and Colin are working together on a science project, reanimating a dead body. Together, these two are my favorite unlikely duo in the show. Also, the brief image of Laszlo’s previously successful work on a “Jerk-Off Machine”, a reanimated raccoon cranking a wheel to move an apparatus backward and forward made me laugh out loud. As does the way his character unashamedly talks about anything sex-related.
The third episode also introduced a fun gag with the concept of sleep hypnosis being able to completely change the vampire’s personalities and desires. Soon they’re off to the races, hypnotizing each other for their own selfish ends.
What stood out to me in the third episode was Colin Robinson. First, he has a giant image of David Schimmer’s head on a roll out canvas print, which thankfully didn’t require any further explanation. Behind this canvas, is Colin’s intricate mappings of the power dynamics of his housemates and their relationships. In Colin’s words this is where he maps out in the house “who’s hot who’s not, who’s chic who’s weak, who’s fly, who’s shy who’s balling who’s stallin’”.
It’s fun to see the more savvy, chic and conniving Colin Robinson, contrasted with the first season where he is more one-dimensionally boring and soul sucking as an energy vampire dressed in beige office wear. Colin’s character can inhabit both these spaces at once, delightfully conniving on one hand and incredibly boring and mundane on the other, and that’s fun to see.
What ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Does Especially Well
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ inhabits an interesting niche. It’s a show that is gothic and supernatural on one hand, capable of showing characters (human and otherwise) dying hilarious and gruesome deaths. Yet it’s also a comedy that contrasts the supernatural with the everyday desires and squabbles that we all come to share. In this way, it maintains a certain lightness to it, and it also inhabits this positive space where we can see characters grow.
In the sixth and final season, I’m excited to see where Guillermo and the four main cast of vampires end up. I suspect they won’t conquer the New World. But their final acceptance of that fate will surely be rife with comedic drama.
“What We Do in the Shadows” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX and is available streaming the next day on Hulu.
Cast and Crew:
Cast: Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasha Demetriou, Harvey Guillén, Mark Proksch, Kristen Schaal
Created by: Jermaine Clement
Cinematography by: DJ Stipsen | Edited by: Yana Gorskaya, Shawn Paper, Dane McMaster
Composer: Mark Mothersbaugh
By Tim Spross
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Tim Spross is a writer based in New York City. He believes storytelling allows us to live multiple lives and supercharges an empathy for different perspectives and cultures. He is especially interested in how cinema and stories relate with dreams, the subconscious, and our innate desire for myths. Tim is attracted to The Hollywood Insider’s mission to spread positivity, education, and dialogue through its publication, and he wants to explore ideas together with its readers, helping himself and others to develop new perspectives.
Tim Spross is a writer based in New York City. He believes storytelling allows us to live multiple lives and supercharges an empathy for different perspectives and cultures. He is especially interested in how cinema and stories relate with dreams, the subconscious, and our innate desire for myths. Tim is attracted to The Hollywood Insider’s mission to spread positivity, education, and dialogue through its publication, and he wants to explore ideas together with its readers, helping himself and others to develop new perspectives.
Tim Spross is a writer based in New York City. He believes storytelling allows us to live multiple lives and supercharges an empathy for different perspectives and cultures. He is especially interested in how cinema and stories relate with dreams, the subconscious, and our innate desire for myths. Tim is attracted to The Hollywood Insider’s mission to spread positivity, education, and dialogue through its publication, and he wants to explore ideas together with its readers, helping himself and others to develop new perspectives.
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