What We Do in The Shadows: Season 3 REVIEW
What We Do in the Shadows is now in its third season. Its fifteenth hour marks its thirteenth season. More if you include the original film. This sitcom, which is a surprisingly cosy one about vampires living in big cities as roomies, has probably had a longer shelf life than anyone expected. The third season seems to be more about pushing forwards and exploring new avenues in the vampire’s underworld. They have already lived through their daily lives.
This game, which attempts to explore New York’s hazy underworld of creepy and ghouls, begins to expose some of the group’s internal fault lines. What is the leader of the group? Nandor is the obvious choice, as he’s both the largest and the oldest. These qualifications are still very important to the playgroup dynamics among the vampires.
Nandor, an ancient warlord, has made the decision to fall in love with any undead woman. It’s the same story as in all sitcoms, with a series of female guest stars acting as the amused recipients of the main character’s hilarious-guy bumbling. Then, they are never seen again. Kristen Schaal is a recurring character in the main cast, but she is not the one who receives Nandor’s confused affections.
Schaal is the most powerful of the season’s celebrity guests. This is despite her being on the sidelines. There’s nothing on par with the first run putting the vampiric foursome of Paul Reubens, Tilda Swinton, Danny Trejo and Wesley Snipes in the same room, or the second deploying an almost-unrecognisable Mark Hamill as Lazlo’s nemesis. This season features David Cross, but he is barely used – in a comedy program. It is shameful.
Guillermo is the only person who can be trusted, despite everything. The rest of the gang may be content to appear languid in anachronistic clothing, but Guillermo is the one who actually gets things done. He was the one who saved the lives of everyone else at the end the second season.
It’s much more than that though. He is a clear protagonist, even if he isn’t necessarily the best, but he’s a lovable underdog and has a goal to become a vampire. Here are the problems.
The tension between him wanting to become a vampire and the vamps wanting him to stay their unpaid servant must not be played too hard to avoid something breaking. One analogy is to jumping the shark, where the unrequited romantic tension and the pairing finally come together. Without the dynamic driving it, everything falls apart.
It’s something they don’t often touch upon, but they make it so obvious that it is world-shatteringly crucial to him. This begs the question: why doesn’t he bring it up more often? He is especially needed by the vampires to rescue them from a terrible situation, which is often the case. You might think that this is the right time to ask him. It turns out that it is not. It is obvious that the sitcom universe has God as the status quo, but when a character ignores their main motivation, it becomes baffling.
