What We Do In The Shadows' final season is off to a hell of a start

It’s natural for any TV show entering its final season—which FX’s still-riotously-funny What We Do In The Shadows did tonight, with a mostly excellent triptych of vampire-sitcom fun—to take stock of itself. Unlike some past season premieres, this unofficial three-parter isn’t especially worried about setting up a bunch of big year-long premise shifts or blowing up its basic character dynamics in service of energizing drama. Instead, we get 90 minutes of joyfully black comedy that’s two parts “How’d we get here?” and one part “And where are we going?” with a focus on highlighting the kinds of episodes that have made this series such a pleasure rather than any kind of flashy season-starting stunts.

It’s slightly ironic, then, that the actual premiere episode, “The Return Of Jerry,” is the one that’s a bit of an off-model beast and sometimes to its detriment. The basic premise of the episode, at least, is classic Shadows: Sitting around bored one night in the aftermath of Guillermo moving out of the house, the vampires suddenly remember their old housemate Jerry (Mike O’Brien). After a moment of reminiscing about what a cool, driven guy he was, the vamps collectively give each other “Oh shit” faces, as they remember what actually happened to Jerry: He’s been super-slumbering in a back room for about 50 years, because his dipshit roommates forgot to wake him up for New Year’s Eve 1996.

The idea that there could plausibly be whole extra rooms, and, more importantly, characters lurking behind some closed door in the sprawling Vampire Residence is part of what makes us so glad to have What We Do In The Shadows back in our un-lives: It has such elasticity built into both its worlds and its people that you totally buy this patently silly reveal. Of course there’s an elevator down to a never-seen storage room at the back of that big central hallway we’re always looking down; of course Nandor, Nadja, Laszlo, and Colin Robinson are the kind of people who’d forget that they’ve left a good friend on snooze for the entirety of the 21st century.

When Jerry actually wakes up, though, “The Return” runs into some rockier waters. As a focused, driven straight man being introduced into a world of genial incompetence (that he then immediately starts questioning), the character feels a bit like the show’s version of Frank Grimes from classic Simpsons self-interrogation “Homer’s Enemy.” But even as this episode gets some fun out of asking certain basic questions about the show’s premise—notably, the presence of the documentary crew, who get a lot of attention tonight—it also highlights why this particular brand of navel gazing has a pretty short shelf-life. The show has gone to the “Life on Staten Island has made the vamps soft and lazy” well a number of times over the years, so nothing Jerry says about Nandor’s un-relentingness or Laszlo’s dilettante nature is especially cutting. At the same time, O’Brien is running the character so deliberately blandly that there’s nothing about Jerry himself for us to hold onto, either.

Notably, he gets little screen time with the character he’s probably most meant to serve as a foil to: fellow straight man Guillermo, who has, as noted above, moved out of the Residence…and into Laszlo’s old jack-off shed in the back yard. (There’s a smell, we’re told.) If we’re trying to look at “The Return Of Jerry” strictly from a character point of view—which can be a deceptively limiting point of view for a series as committed to its gags as this one—then Jerry’s firm boundaries with his old friends are meant to stand in contrast to how wobbly Guillermo’s remain. And not just because he’s a one-minute walk away from the house: The poor guy just can’t help himself from assisting these jerks, for reasons both practical—left to their own guidance, the vamps immediately decide the only way to fix their messed-up relationship dynamic with Jerry is to violently murder him—and emotional. After a whole season that seriously highlighted Gizmo’s inability to leave his friends’ orbit, it can’t help but feel a bit repetitive to be back here so quickly.

By the time the episode is over, the crew has solved the problem in their usual way—pawning Jerry off on The Guide, who’s instantly enamored with both his take-charge attitude and his renewed interest in the whole “Conquering America for the vampires” thing. And it’s not like we haven’t had a few laughs along the way, including an all-timer Matt Berry line read when Nadja asks if Laszlo’s reanimated interest in reanimating the dead isn’t just a bit like Frankenstein. (“…Whoo?”) (The running gag about the vamps trying to update Jerry on everything he’s missed, and then having him frustratedly remind him that he was actually around for at least 4/5ths of “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” also stays consistently fun.) But there are episodes of What We Do In The Shadows that are funny because the people who write, stage, and perform these scripts are just base-level very funny people and episodes that are transcendent because they dial full-bore into the show’s absurdist strengths. “The Return Of Jerry” is one of the former.

By contrast, though, second episode “Headhunting” is an all-time banger, driven by two potent forces the show has learned to marshal well since its 2019 premiere: a pair of A/B plots that play hard to the show’s best impulses and a focus that confines its characters to two of its best pairings (Guillermo and Nadja [ft. Nandor] on the one hand, and the ever-reliable Colin Robinson/Laszlo team-up on the other). 

Let’s start with the latter, since it’s the lighter of our two stories: After stumbling on to the remains of an old experiment during the previous episode’s Jerry Hunt, Laszlo’s gone mad for the idea of reanimating the dead, recruiting Colin (who’s excited at the idea of literally making a friend) to serve as his Igor/apprentice. Besides letting the show bust out an awesome new set—complete with Tesla coils!—the plot lets Lasz and Colin do the enthusiastic nerd thing that often brings them together for some of the show’s best chaos, trawling rideshare services to find the best head to stick on their new monster man. The plot eventually manages to work in a few nice character notes—Colin succeeds at taming Cravensworth’s Monster where Laszlo has failed in the past, because patience is one of the energy vampire’s very few virtues—but it’s mostly an excuse to make a bunch of jokes about decapitating people, adult braces, and, of course, a raccoon-powered jack-off machine (seriously: props to the prop team in these three episodes).  

Guillermo, meanwhile, has found himself living through Baby’s First Industry after he gets, well, headhunted away from his old pals at Panera Bread by a finance firm looking for more help in their mailroom. There’s already a fun idea at play here in the fact that working for cutthroat money types (led by Tim Heidecker, playing a restrained version of business douchebag to good effect) is less stressful than being the personal babysitter for four full-grown vampires. But things reach a heightened level of brilliance once Nadja and Nandor decide they have to assist Gizmo’s climb up the corporate ladder, or he’ll flip out, blame them for his failures, and kill everybody in the house. (The scene where the pair convince themselves of this absurd certainty is another reminder of the benefits Shadows draws from its flexible approach to reality; the show knows it doesn’t need a good reason to get Nadja and Nandor wandering around the Cannon Capital offices, just a reason.) Nandor as a janitor is good, obviously, but nothing beats Nadja in full “impression of a human” mode. (We had a lot of laugh-out-loud moments across these three episodes, but none of them harder than Natasia Demetriou loudly declaring “Mmm, Mama’s go-go juice!” before cheerfully pouring an entire pot of coffee on the floor.) The Nandor-Guillermo pairing has a dopey sweetness that serves as the show’s heart, but Nadja and Guillermo have steadily become one of its most potent comedy teams; the characters are able to talk to each other on the same nasty level in a way Guillermo usually can’t with the vampires, and there’s a lot of fun to be had as Nadja steadily kills her lil’ buddy’s way toward the top.

(And while “Jerry” lampshaded things more aggressively, we’ll take a second to note that this is also a very good episode for poking at the show’s base reality a bit. Guillermo is genuinely unnerved when the camera crew refuses to take no for an answer and follows him into his new job, and the sight of Nandor carrying a whole-ass dead guy in a semi-transparent garbage bag is one of those fun “Oh yeah, they murder people” moments the show cheerfully deploys roughly once a season.)

It doesn’t hurt that “Headhunting” is fundamentally forward facing; we could watch several more episodes of Guillermo hanging out on Wall Street with Nadja’s fantastic Business Person Hair and Nandor vacuuming the roof. (Laszlo, Colin, and the Monster feel like more of a small-doses plot, because there’s probably only so much you can do with “Frankenstein loves Latin jazz.” But it’s still fun.) We’re not expecting the series to end with Guillermo becoming a high-end power broker or anything, but the look at a new setting is an effective tease for where else this season could go as our characters push out for the last time from the safety of Staten Island.

Not just yet, though, because “Sleep Hypnosis,” the third installment of tonight’s return, is another look back—albeit one that works better than “Return Of Jerry” on account of grabbing hold of another What We Do In The Shadows staple episode type: taking one Big, Silly Vampire Concept and running it as hard, and as far, as it can. 

Conflict has broken out in the Vampire Residence, see, as Nadja and Nandor get into an argument about how to use Guillermo’s former living cranny underneath the stairs. (Nandor: home gym that only he can use; Nadja: storage for the many, many body parts Laszlo has collected during his reanimation experiments.) After Nandor finds himself sorely disappointed by the reality of being a one-man voting bloc in a three-person democracy—and while this is a very good episode for Kayvan Novak, period, he’s never more charming than in his seemingly genuine shock when he realizes he’s lost that vote. Colin Robinson decides he has to take matters into his own sallow hands. (The reveal that Colin keeps an incredibly detailed chart of the house’s very basic power dynamics, hidden behind a giant photo of Most Hated Friend David Schwimmer, is a very fun visual gag.) After picking Guillermo’s tired brain, Colin hits on the most obvious of solutions: hypnotizing Nandor in his sleep to get back some of his old Relentlessness. 

Vampire hypnosis has always been one of this show’s secret weapons, allowing characters to do the silliest imaginable shit with impunity in a way that lets comedy flow without worrying about dorky things like “narrative consequences.” Normally, that freedom’s aimed outwards, but “Sleep Hypnosis” focuses that same malleability on the vamps themselves to very funny effect. After a newly warlike Nandor seizes the staircase space (and then sets the whole thing on fire in a very medieval understanding of fairness), the idea starts to spread: Nadja turns Laszlo into a neat freak, and then, in the funniest extended bit of the episode, Colin decides Nandor would be even better if he exclusively spoke in the words and voice of Richard Nixon. Novak gets an enormous amount of mileage out of this limitation, showing increasing desperation in Nandor’s eyes even as he continues to rattle off tired political monologues about his beloved dog Checkers. Forced to fix things as usual, Guillermo takes a brief trip out to the wilds of Nutley, New Jersey, that not only reveals that The Baron is back to looking like Doug Jones again—courtesy of “healing cream” extracted from last season’s Guillermo-Frogs—but that the whole sleep hypnosis thing is a common enough problem amongst vampires that the older undead knows an easy fix.

But, because What We Do In The Shadows is a show that knows a good escalation when it sees it, nothing actually gets solved until we get two more twists on the formula. The first is mostly just goofy fun, as The Baron’s iPhone-recorded hypnosis message sandblasts everybody’s memories back to before they met, producing lots of fun little moments as they revert to their younger selves. (Laszlo makes the same aroused “I say, hello” when catching first sight of both Nadja and Colin Robison, while Nadja can’t stop smiling and waving at the camera.) After The Guide pops back in to remind us about Jerry’s plans/catch some flirtation from hypnotized Nandor/justify Kristen Schaal being main cast on the series, this little SNAFU is quickly addressed…leading to one last twist that gives the episode a touch of genuine heart.

See, Guillermo apparently left The Baron’s memory-erasing hypnosis message on his phone and accidentally played it for himself while drifting off to sleep. Which allows What We Do In The Shadows to give us a version of a scene we’ve never actually gotten to see, since it would mess with the show’s documentary conceit: the now-brainwashed-back-to-his-earliest-days Guillermo interviewing for his position as Nandor’s familiar all over again. There’s something genuinely sweet about seeing Harvey Guillén get to play our little Gizmo without five seasons of wary, weary knowledge that the people he loves are idiots who kind of hate him. It’s just as nice to see Novak let real affection into his eyes and voice as Nandor reflects the genuine admiration and awe that Guillermo projects at meeting a real live(?) vampire. The Guillermo-Nandor relationship is, for all its toxic baggage, the heart of this show, and getting to see the gentleness of its first moments—even with the context of one character lying about the other one being mind-controlled, natch—is surprisingly lovely way to kick off this final season.

Which is, we’re happy to say, off to an excellent start. These three episodes aren’t perfect—and we’re really hoping Mike O’Brien finds more notes to play in Jerry when he reappears—but it’s clear from this opening salvo that What We Do In The Shadows has reached a level of near-perfect comfort with itself. It knows what works, it knows how best to pair off its characters for instant comic impact, and at this point, it can take one of its delightfully goofy concept episodes and execute it adroitly with a minimum of fuss. If we’d come to the start of this season expecting some world-changing, life rearranging shake-ups to serve as the prelude for an epic finale, we might be a little miffed; approaching it as one last blessed run of one of TV’s best comedies, though, and it’s clear the show knows exactly what it needs to deliver for this final stretch.

Stray observations

• • “So, did you end up conquering just the United States, or did you decide ‘The New World’ meant Canada and Mexico as well?”
• • The vampires are very excited to announce that they’ve conquered their street and most of Ashley Street.
• • Of course, nobody actually remembers why the camera crew is filming them; even when they go ask Guillermo, he never has a chance to give a straight answer.
• • “Guillermo! This bucket…smells…like pee-pee!” All of Nadja’s business, taunting Guillermo about where he makes toilet in the jack-shack, is very good.
• • “I had to warn him about the modern roads with the steel horses with their rubber feet.”
  “Again, I know what a fucking car is. I wasn’t asleep that long.”
• • Colin Robinson has two running sub-plots in “The Return Of Jerry.” Neither one goes very far beyond a basic execution of a joke, though.
• • “Gizmo, would you please tell my wife if she wishes to kick a man while he’s down, to do so in wrrriting.”
• • Between the Alexander Haig joke in “Jerry” and the Kissinger reference/Nandor’s impression in “Sleep Hypnosis,” the Nixon White House caught a lot of strays tonight.
• • Cannot help but be distracted by Laszlo using a classic Sony DualShock controller to control his reanimated arm.
• • “Keep up the good work, Jacob.”
• • “Make no mistake, Guillermo. Without me, you are the cow that carries the corpses to the burn pit. With me, you are the prize pig who gets to eat with the mayor and his big-titted wife.”
• • Laszlo claims to have been a major inspiration for Robert Oppenheimer. Tragic that Nolan didn’t include it in the film.
• • “If he’s not careful, I fear this whole thing could turn into a monster mash. Or, worse still, a graveyard smash.” Sometimes there are lines on this show that you’d have to roll your eyes at if they hadn’t been clever enough to give them to Matt Berry.
• • “Eh, screw it, monster can have a mouse as a treat.”
• • Nandor’s feeling tired: “Perhaps it is time for this old cowboy to just hang up his spurs and go fuck himself, right up the pooper.”
• • Of course Nadja casually snacks on one of the firefighters who come to stop Nandor’s fire.
• • The Baron’s memory-wiping message erasing his own memory of recording the memory-wiping message is a real simple carb as far as jokes go, but it got a smile.
• • Great bit of facial acting from Berry as he reveals that Laszlo is loving his “new” digs, except for being “disoriented, slightly afraid, and don’t know who you are.”
• • We can joke about Kristen Schaal’s general lack of screen-time, but she makes the most of it, reminiscing about Vampire Council Sleepaway Camp: “Those bitches in Cabin 9…”