FX’s fairly funny new comedy “What We Do in the Shadows” makes a valiant attempt to bring the mockumentary back from the dead. The format had a robust run in film (beginning more or less with 1984’s “This Is Spinal Tap”) and especially television (“The Office,” “The Comeback,” “Modern Family” and so on), but lately the meta-notion of building a comedy from the premise that characters are being followed by a documentary film crew seems sort of sucked dry, doesn’t it?
Good thing the subjects here are vampires. If “What We Do in the Shadows” feels late to the game — well, you try staying hip when you’re several centuries old. What does it matter to these creatures of the night if it’s 2006 or 2019?
Here, viewers are told a film crew has gained permission to follow a trio of pathetically outdated bloodsuckers living together in a reclusive, “Grey Gardens”-type situation in a decrepit manse on New York’s Staten Island. They venture out mainly to feed and, as a former Ottoman Empire marauder named Nandor the Relentless points out during a house meeting, their sloppiness has become a hygiene issue.
“Someone,” complains Nandor (Kayvan Novak), has been leaving their human victims around the house, “Half-drunk. Please, finish a whole victim before moving on to the next one.”
“Why don’t we just write on them with marking pen? Put our names and the date?” suggests Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), an Old World seductress. “Make sure they’re permanent – Sharpie.”
You get the idea. It’s the immigrant story taken to a creepy extreme, as old as “The Addams Family,” “The Munsters” and any other metaphorical representation of the paranoia and xenophobia that greet most outsiders. “What We Do in the Shadows” is based on a measurably better 2014 movie of the same name from Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Conchords”) and Taika Waititi (director of “Thor: Ragnarok”). The film, which was made and released in New Zealand and found fans worldwide, was about four vampires sharing a house in Wellington while awkwardly trying to relate to the world around them – sometimes running afoul of a pack of local werewolves.
Clement and Waititi have essentially relocated and expanded the idea for American TV, with results ranging from anemically predictable to uproariously clever, depending on the bit. (No pun intended.) What’s most entertaining about the show might be its intentional lack of complexity. The jokes are right where you expect to find them.
Novak lends a convincing note of vulnerability to the pridefully deluded Nandor, who is enmeshed in a codependent, master-servant relationship with his human familiar Guillermo (played by Harvey Guillen, who provides at least half the big laughs). Guillermo is a nerd who has wanted to become a vampire since he first saw Antonio Banderas in the 1994 film adaptation of “Interview With the Vampire.”
The other vampire in the house is a fop named Laszlo (Matt Berry), who was turned into a vampire a few centuries ago by Nadja; the two maintain an open relationship, since it’s clear she has long since tired of him.
The three are joined by another horrific housemate — an “energy vampire” named Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch). He’s an unassuming, khaki-and-sweater-clad day-walker with an office job, where he moves from cubicle to cubicle and bores his co-workers with inane small talk until they are drained of energy and collapse.
“You probably know an energy vampire,” Colin tells the mockumentary’s camera. “We’re the most common kind of vampire.”
The Staten Island vampires receive a surprise letter informing them that their Old World superior, a powerful (and naked) vampire named Baron Afanas (“Star Trek: Discovery’s” Doug Jones), is making a trans-Atlantic visit to check on their progress; the baron had commanded them to travel to America some 200 years ago to begin transforming its inhabitants into a vampire army.
Afraid to admit that they’ve spent the 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries loafing around, Nandor and company try to make up for lost time. Colin takes them to one of his favorite places to suck energy — the public-input sessions at the borough’s weekly council meetings, “a smorgasbord of banality and despair” — where Nandor gives elected officials a chance to submit to his rule.
