What We Do in the Shadows (2019)

The cast sells every moment beautifully. ... This comedy draws you into its thrall from the very first episode. From there it pulsates with such an oddball sweetness that every new episode invites the unsuspecting viewer further into its moth-eaten gothic shenanigans.

A spoof that works for people who love vampire films and people who don’t. Even the obvious and sophomoric stuff is served up with a wicked twist. Humor and horror tend to be flip sides of the same coin (metaphoric means of dealing with painful subjects), and you find them twisting around each other in ferociously funny ways throughout these episodes.

Shadows' succulent mashup of the macabre and mundane remains wonderfully fresh. [18-31 Mar 2019, p.12]

Funny and inventive. ... The real achievement might be in how surprisingly fresh the conceit feels episode after episode, which is no easy feat.

What I do know is that Shadows, the series, is FUNNY —often deadpan, sometimes quietly droll, sometimes howl-at-the-moon hilarious.

No one is really going for the jugular, though. Your funny bone is the main target, with the humor ranging from broad to subtle. .... So yes, these vampires still suck--but in a unique series that otherwise just tickles.

While watching the first three episodes, this show reminded me of “The Office” but with a lot more violence, adult situations and neck biting. What We Do in the Shadows is a quirky and off-beat comedy worth checking out.

This is the strange, irreverent, yet utterly “normal” take on vampires—and that’s exactly what keeps things interesting.

Like the original, the show is in no small part about being a vampire and vampirism, the loneliness and isolation the lifestyle demands. The audience, then, takes Guillermo as a clear surrogate. We’re just glad to be part of this hidden world.

A jolly spoof of demonic gloom.

Shadows thrives on characters and droll dialogue more than story. In fact, what gives the show an edge over the movie is the addition of an instantly familiar new species: an “energy vampire” who drains his victims of life force without so much as breaking their skin.

Quirky, droll and surprisingly dry ... Perhaps foremost, the show is unpretentious in its just plain silliness.

The 30-minute episodes are refreshingly self-contained so viewers don’t have to add more mental notes in their already-crowded Prime TV memory bank.

This is an appealingly low-stakes series that’s content to be silly and mildly perverse, and that packs a lot of jokes into its half-hour running time.

What We Do in the Shadows is one of those conceptual comedies with a limited premise that you expect to die off at any moment, but it keeps coming as though it doesn't know how to die.

It seems to me that What We Do in the Shadows has more up its sleeve than just re-creating the vibe of the original. I’m eager to see the show find yet more creative ways to expand upon its central conceit: that even in the antiseptic, brightly-lit modern world, monsters are all around us.

A smart, funny sitcom that I could easily see running for years. It fits perfectly into FX’s off-kilter sense of humor, and actually gets a little funnier with each episode. If you liked the movie, be patient with the series. It took me a little while to warm up to these awkward bloodsuckers, but they eventually won me over.

If Shadows doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun. Its pleasures are in the goofy details.

The four lead vampires feed on pretense and find laughs in something as simple as hissing. But it’s Guillen and Feldstein who bring the spice.

The laughs, when they come, are usually explosive. What We Do in the Shadows in its TV incarnation quickly demonstrates a capacity for growth that its main characters lost centuries ago, if they ever had it to begin with.

The show is a smart, irreverent spoof, shot as a mockumentary.

When “WWDITS” hits a comedy vein, it can be extremely funny. It would be improved if viewers had the opportunity to dine out on the humor of its continuing storylines with greater frequency.

What We Do in the Shadows has all the right pieces to become another mockumentary great. It nails the tone of the film, mining incredible comedy from the meeting of the supernatural and the banal, delivering one quotable one-liner after the next, and genuinely surprising with its darker gags.

There’s a lot to admire in the opening episodes, and the potential within each only drives more excitement for the next.

Clement has years of comedy writing for television under his belt, and Waititi years of directing. The two play to their strengths here, and the results are enough to get audiences to overlook the moments when the jokes don’t land or the humor is a little musty.

This show’s laughs are closer to chuckles than guffaws — it’s well-observed but its ambitions feel more minor than much else in this era of the relentless big swing.

The series certainly offers some amusing additions to this occult universe, but the comedic value of its more familiar material has begun to diminish now that the concept must sustain not only a feature-length movie, but multiple episodes of television.

There were gags about sex, blood and death, plus worshipful nods to Twilight and Interview with a Vampire. Whether the basic joke is enough for a whole series remains to be seen.