Review: What We Do In The Shadows, "Reunited"/"The Lamp" | Season 4, Episodes 1 and 2

Everyone’s favorite vampire mockumentary shrugs off last year’s cliffhangers and resets, with hilarious results

Photo: FX

When last we left our vampire friends and their very conflicted human companion at the end of What We Do in the Shadows’s third season, they had each embarked on very specific, very weird journeys. The painfully lonely Nandor, having decided not to go into “super-slumber,” was about to hop on a train as part of a journey back to his homeland. Nadja was on her way to London to join the Worldwide Supreme Vampiric Council, with Guillermo reluctantly in tow (after Laszlo hastily nailed him into a coffin to ship alongside his true love). And Laszlo returned to the tiny vampire colony’s stately Staten Island residence, to look after the creepy baby that crawled out of the ashes of Colin Robinson’s desiccated corpse.

So does season four’s premiere episode, “Reunited,” begin with everyone still scattered? Nah. It’s one year later and whaddaya know? Everyone returns to the house at the same time. Then, not long after the reunion in “Reunited,” Nadja comes up with a new idea to generate some income… and, as it happens, a new plot arc for the new season. It’s Vampire Nightclub time, everybody!

But we’ll get to that in a moment. First: Hello friends and Episodic Medium subscribers. Welcome to my coverage of What We Do in the Shadows season four. This is a show I dearly love and am looking forward to digging into, because there’s nothing quite like it on television. It’s a mockumentary using a seemingly played-out sitcom schtick more thoughtfully than most of its peers and predecessors. And it’s a horror comedy that doesn’t skimp on either the gasp-worthy special effects or the raw, raunchy, gut-level laughs.

It’s also a character-driven slice-of-life that has sneakily converted a “wacky situation of the week” format into a surprisingly poignant serialized saga, all about how living forever can be its own kind of hell. By the end of last season, Shadows fans were watching one of the most profound and thorny depictions of immortal ennui since the movie Only Lovers Left Alive (or maybe even The Hunger).

Because of this, if I wanted to be a cranky TV critic, I could complain about how quickly the Shadows writers ditched a bunch of potentially fruitful storylines at the start of this new season. In the premiere the vampires catch us up on how they spent the hiatus, and frankly it’s a bit of a letdown:

Nandor took a train to “Fresno, I think it’s called,” where he met a nice family from Wisconsin, who inspired him to hop the freighter to the Middle East that got stuck in the Suez Canal. Nadja got bored with the WSVC’s endless subcommittee meetings. Laszlo started training the rapidly growing young Colin Robinson not to be boring… which mostly involved sitting on the sofa with the boy in a rapidly crumbling, raccoon-infested house, learning about terra-cotta backsplashes and surprisingly affordable shiplap accent walls via their favorite home renovation TV show. (“Bran and Toby are brothers with a keen eye on interior decor,” Laszlo coos.)

The only housemate who may have had a wild adventure since last year’s finale is Guillermo, who in the two episodes that FX aired tonight — “Reunited,” followed by “The Lamp” — hints briefly that he may have met someone, as he makes a mysterious phone call. Even Guillermo though falls quickly back into old patterns, after grouchily insisting to everyone that they’re “dead” to him. (“Technically, we’re all already dead,” Nadja notes with a dismissive chuckle.) He takes charge of making the house habitable again; and he makes sure Laszlo doesn’t let Toddler Colin Robinson swim around in the gaseous basement sewage with a lit candle on his head. (“It helps him shake off the sillies,” Laszlo shrugs.)

“Reunited” is mostly about putting everyone back where they belong, while also reestablishing that this show works best when the characters are in one place, pulling in different directions and talking past each other. In other words: Who cares if the writers have barely followed up on any of last year’s cliffhangers? Having our antiheroes join forces again to launch a Vampire Nightclub (“Like in the film Blade!,” Nadja explains) is way more fun… and funny.

“The Lamp” is about the literal nuts and bolts of Nadja’s idea, as she hires a construction crew to start building a dance-floor and blood-sprinklers at the headquarters of the American Eastern Seaboard Vampiric Council. This scheme doesn’t go over so well with The Guide (played as always by the wonderful Kristen Schaal), who brings in a seemingly infinite brigade of wraiths to sabotage the build.

Enter Laszlo, who recognizes that The Guide has some psychological hangup, preventing her from embracing Nadja’s plan. (Laszlo knows all about psychology, because he was there at the discipline’s conception. In fact, it’s when Sigmund Freud “caught sight of my rather generous John Thomas” that the doctor stopped theorizing about “hand envy” and instead focused more on what Laszlo calls “wanting of the wang.”) By using a soothing voice and guiding The Guide through her own mind, he leads her to a room labeled “Shame: Do Not Open,” which then prompts her to admit that she has an erotic attraction to vampire killers. (Can Guillermo help? To be continued.)

“The Lamp” is the more visually striking of these first two episodes. The Guide’s wraiths come across like a live-action MAD magazine “Spy vs. Spy” gag, as they saw holes under the construction workers’ ladders.

The B-plot in “The Lamp” offers even more delights. Determined to stave off eternal loneliness by getting married, Nandor summons a djinn (played with a seen-it-all deadpan by Anoop Desai) and wishes for all 37 of his dead wives (some of whom were men) to be brought back to life, so that he can pick one to re-wed, after a Bachelor-style competition. This leads to the most hilarious running gag of both of these episodes. As Nandor crosses potential mates off his list, he has the djinn disintegrate them — “re-dead”-ing them, he insists, not “killing” them — with a burst of light and a puff of dust, which we see repeatedly in the back or side of the frame, as part of a montage of bad dates. The contrast between the objective journalistic eye of the camera and the little flashes of death… It’s comic genius.

The Nandor plotline is central to what Shadows does so well with character and theme. Nandor’s melancholy makes him sympathetic. It also makes him careless. He’s lost in his own needs, largely disconnected from the modern world — and all-too-willing to use his supernatural powers as a steamrolling shortcut, regardless of who gets flattened along the way. He’s so enamored of his legend and his wealth that he thinks he can woo his next wife with a fancy spoon. And when Guillermo tells him that spoons are no longer as rare as they used to be, what can Nandor say? Only this, in a tone tinged with frustration and sorrow: “We live in a time of miracles.”

Stray observations

• Going forward with these reviews I’ll likely use the whole title for the series once or twice toward the beginning of the write-up and then stick with Shadows the rest of the way for brevity’s sake. I could go with WWDITS but I’m the kind of writer who reads his own words aloud to make sure they sound right, so an acronym without a clean phonetic equivalent won’t work for me.

• Always good to see the Sklar brothers, Randy and Jason, here playing television’s favorite home-builders, Bran and Toby. So far they’ve only appeared on TV in the background of scenes, but it’s almost a certainty that they’re going to get involved with renovating the vampires’ dangerously decrepit lair, yes?

• Nadja tries to goad The Guide into going along with the Vampire Nightclub plan by suggesting that someone on the Worldwide Supreme Vampiric Council thinks the American Eastern Seaboard’s property would be more valuable leased out to a CVS pharmacy. “Who said that?” the scandalized Guide gasps. “The… main one,” Nadja lies.

• During Nandor’s montage of bad dates and spousal re-dead-ing, there’s a clever nod to Annie Hall’s lobster gag, as Nandor tries in vain to recapture the fun of an old relationship by chasing his prospective wife around the kitchen with a crustacean in his hand (until she gets hit by a truck… that never happened in a Woody Allen film).

• Part of Laszlo’s long-term plan to make New Colin Robinson less boring involves some morally questionable aversion therapy, including making the boy look at grindingly tedious imagery of potatoes and Idaho road signs, and asking him to choose between “important literature or colorful shit” (then zapping him when he picks the latter). On the other hand, he does lets the kid eat all the Count Chocula he wants.

• I could fill the entirety of these reviews just with my favorite Matt Berry’s line-readings, but instead I’ll think I’ll close out each week with a ranked list of the best. Here’s this week’s Top Five, covering two episodes:

• 5—In general, just the way Laszlo stretches out the last word of each sentence when he’s acting as The Guide’s hypnotist. (“Continuing down the corridor of your miiiind… What do you seeeee…?”)

• 4—Asking Nandor if he wants to join in on his sexual romp with Nadja by adding that there’s “room at the back.”

• 3—“Why haven’t we finished fucking, you may ask yourself?”

• 2—“Automated teller machine card.” (Tied with: “Automated teller machine card password.”)

• 1—After complaining about the groaning and knocking pipes, then finding out the noise is actually just Guillermo trapped in a coffin, Laszlo enthusing, “Good news is, pipes are fine!”