Review: What We Do in the Shadows, “The Return of Jerry” | Season 6, Episode 1

Before our favorite vampires say goodbye to us, they have unfinished business to attend to… and an old friend to help them do it

Photo: Russ Martin/FX

Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of FX’s What We Do In The Shadows, which returns for its sixth and final season. Three episodes debuted tonight, but after watching them Noel thought it made more sense to do three reviews, so additional reviews will go up tomorrow morning and then tomorrow evening for paid subscribers. To keep reading along, and to receive reviews of all the shows we’ve covering this fall, considering supporting Episodic Medium with a paid subscription.

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Whenever you hear that one of your favorite television series is coming to an end, how do you feel? I’m genuinely curious. Me, I hate it when a good show gets cancelled outright. But when a network or streaming service announces that the next season will be the last? I’m fine with that. Even if it’s not what the showrunners wanted, it’s okay, really. Things end. So long as the writers and cast get to reach some kind of planned conclusion, I’d rather celebrate what they achieved than curse the TV execs.

Plus there’s this: Finality forces focus. Consider our vampire friends from What We Do in the Shadows. They are, ostensibly, immortal, barring any misadventures with sunlight or stakes, which may explain why they are so damnably lazy. They’re in no hurry. Big plans can wait. Their shabby residence can be cleaned up tomorrow… or next week… or years from now. They have no sense of urgency. Just ask Jerry.

Who’s Jerry, you ask? Why, that would be Jerry the Vampire (Mike O’Brien), the housemates’ “all vampire, no bullshit” pal, who went into a “super-slumber” in their basement back in 1976, asking to be awakened on New Year’s Eve, 1996.

Except… the vampires forgot. While going on about their afterlives, just generally futzing around, they let Jerry slip out of their minds altogether. It’s not until they try to recall what they used to keep in Guillermo’s former bedroom under the stairs that they think about asking Jerry, and remember that they’ve let him oversleep for 28 years. (“Shitting fuck!” Nandor exclaims when he realizes their mistake.) When they do finally wake him up, he has one urgent question for them:

“So, how did it go… conquering the New World?”

“The Return of Jerry” follows in the grand tradition of What We Do in the Shadows season premieres that skillfully and unfussily accomplish two storytelling goals: resetting the scene after the previous season’s finale, and setting up the storylines for the season ahead. The difference this time, it seems to me, is the nature of those storylines. They seem to be going somewhere conclusive. I know I should divorce my external knowledge of this show’s production from what’s on the screen, but I can’t help it: while watching this episode, I had a palpable sense of time running out.

In terms of the reset, there’s not a lot for the episode’s credited writer Paul Simms (who is also our trusty showrunner) to do, given that Season 5 ended with so few loose ends. The biggest unanswered question when Season 6 begins: Where’s Guillermo?

No longer a familiar, Guillermo has returned to a world all humans know well: working at Panera Bread. He’s also moved out of the residence, with Nandor’s help. He now lives in Laszlo’s old garden shed (“where he used to jack off”). Sure, there’s a smell. And some really big stains. And some kind of creepy-looking sex-chair. And when he has to “make toilet” (Nadja’s words), Guillermo uses a big plastic bucket with a toilet paper roll attached. But hey, he only has to pay Nandor $250 a week!

Guillermo, though, gets dragged back into vampire business when Jerry returns, because no one in the house has a good answer for why they’re allowing a camera crew to film them all the time. The housemates are already embarrassed about having to admit to Jerry that they have not, while he was super-slumbering, taken over the New World—and not because they were too busy arguing over whether Mexico and Canada should be included. Instead they’ve just been, well…busy doing nothing in particular. (Well, Laszlo’s been attending to his shrubberies shaped like vulvas. But other than that…?) Also, somewhere along the way, they’ve become complacent about the presence of humans. Jerry is outraged.

Mike O’Brien is an inspired choice to play Jerry, because he has such a low-key, amiable screen presence, which makes the character’s annoyance at the state of his old friends all the funnier. He’s especially irritated at Colin Robinson, who keeps thrusting his iPhone into Jerry’s face to get him up to date on what he missed between 1976 and 2024: the ambiguously colored dress that broke the internet, Michael Dukakis riding in a tank, and the events documented in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” (Jerry, quietly seething about the latter: “I was around for all this.”)

It’s up to Guillermo then to ease the tension in the house by directing Jerry to The Guide, who is more than eager to help him execute his New World-domination plans. (She will also “eff” him, probably.) His first order to her? Pull up everything in the Vampiric Council archives about foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack and Bernie Goetz… oh, and the rock and roller cola wars, of course.

Before Jerry stops nagging everyone though (for now, at least), he plants seeds in the vampires’ heads that will sprout and blossom throughout this season. For example: Jerry’s inability to remember anything about Colin Robinson—who considered Jerry to be his one genuine friend—gets the energy vampire thinking about his loneliness. Meanwhile, the reminder of the now-abandoned conquering scheme rattles Nandor, who worries that he’s gone from being “Nandor the Relentless” to “Nandor the Kinda Nice Guy.” Jerry even dredges up Nadja’s old intentions to infiltrate the world of humans and better understand how they live. (“There is always a sink and a couch and a drawer full of spoons.” That’s all she has so far.)

But it’s Laszlo—sweet, depraved, soulful Laszlo—whose failures prove most poignant. Once, he had pledged to learn how to reanimate dead flesh to create new life, but all he has to show for it after all these decades are some rotting body parts and an anal speculum (“tarnished from years of use”). At one point he gazes forlornly at a shrunken head and thinks how this could’ve been atop “Cravensworth’s New Man.” Then its eye pops out.

Clearly, he has work to do. And the clock, all of a sudden, is ticking.

Stray Observations

• The room under the stairs will become a plot point again in Episode 3, so keep in mind that Nandor wants to keep his “calistheneticals” in that space.

• The vampires annoy Jerry—who, again, was awake as late as the 1970s—by explaining the concept of traffic and telling him about “the steel horses with their rubber feet.”

• With Jerry back, Laszlo finally has someone else around who will say something aloud when changing back from being a “BAT!” Except while Laszlo shouts, “MAN!” Jerry says, “HUMAN FORM!”

• No particular standout Matt Berry line-reading in this episode, though I did like Laszlo praising the simplicity of Jerry the Vampire’s name by saying, “Bam! Thank you misterrrrr….” We also get two examples of Laszlo’s housemates imitating him, with Nadja aping a “he’s riiiight” and Colin Robinson remembering the time Laszlo forbade Nadja from looking for a job in the human world because, “It was too dangerous-ah.”

• Welcome back to the Episodic Medium What We Do in the Shadows reviews! Covering Seasons 4 and 5 were a real pleasure for me and I’m looking forward to joining all of you as we head toward the finish line. Look for my reviews of Episodes 2 and 3 (both of which debuted alongside Episode 1 on FX, and will all be on Hulu tomorrow) over the course of the next day, and then I hope to see you back here next week.