What We Do in the Shadows (2019)

This new season is exactly what you want from What We Do in the Shadows, but even better.

“What We Do in the Shadows” unfolds with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Parody presides over plot, and humor over horror, though occasionally the show takes a pitstop to indulge in undead melancholy and black magic sadism.

Regardless of the prospective shakeups, though, the show remains clever, pleasingly ridiculous fun.

Even if the world weren't ground to a standstill with millions of people locked in their houses, "Shadows" is far and away one of the funnier comedies on television because of its dead-center skewering of the mystique surrounding vampires. No second of each episode's agile twenty-something minutes is wasted.

Season two builds on its predecessor — and goes where few vampire tales have gone before — by having Guillermo explore, however reluctantly, his inborn knack for Buffy-esque carnage. ... Season two also expands the What We Do in the Shadows world in a sillier, if just as genre-savvy, way.

Don’t worry, it’s still funny.

What We Do In The Shadows is exactly what you want a high-concept sitcom about Staten Island vampires to be: funny, fast, unpretentious, and dumb in the very best possible way.

All the pieces are familiar, but all that smooshing makes it all seem new, even when it’s also comfortingly familiar. And luckily for, you know, everyone dealing with everything, the second season offers even more of that familiar novelty. That’s the short version of this review. If you liked the first season, you’ll like this one too, and perhaps even more so.

As was the case with the first season, Shadows can be hit or miss with its humor. None of the four installments FX gave critics to review are quite at the level of last season’s “The Trial” (which featured cameos from former screen vampires Wesley Snipes, Tilda Swinton, Evan Rachel Wood, Paul Reubens, and Danny Trejo). But the laughs come often enough, and are always big enough, to make the comedy a very welcome escape.