Review: In 'Shadows,' on FX, Laid-Back Vampires Return for Another Bite

“What We Do in the Shadows,” beginning Wednesday on FX, has an advantage on that last front, and not just because its characters, a gang of eccentric vampire housemates, are already dead. The 2015 movie, from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, already played like a tight, brief season of TV, in the most pleasurable way.

The mockumentary, about a group of bloodsucking ancients navigating modern life in Wellington, New Zealand, was driven more by character than plot, much like a hangout sitcom. Like Clement’s “Flight of the Conchords,” it had a deadpan — rather, undeadpan — sensibility and a penchant for characters who were less cool than they imagined themselves.

The FX version recasts and relocates to America while retaining the core premise. Staten Island, apparently the New Zealand of the tristate area, is now home base for Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), a medieval Ottoman warrior; Laszlo (Matt Berry), a Romantic-era English dandy; and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo’s rapacious old flame and now hunting partner with benefits. (Clement and Waititi, who co-starred in the film, each write and direct several episodes.)

Having undead roommates, it turns out, is just like having mortal ones, except that you have all eternity to get on one another’s nerves. Early in the premiere, the anxious, fussy Nandor holds a meeting to deal with housekeeping issues, such as the problem of people leaving their guests sitting around half-drunk. (In this case, it means that they’ve been half-drunk.)

Rounding out the house is Colin (Mark Proksch), an “energy vampire” who drains people’s life forces rather than their blood, usually by drawing his officemates into long, boring conversations. So far, in the four episodes provided for review, it’s one of the less-successful additions to the story, a one-joke premise that “Saturday Night Live” might have done as an overlong sketch.

The series focuses more than the film did on the “familiars”: humans who serve as personal assistants to vamps in hopes of someday getting the neck-bite of immortality. Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), an earnest nerd, is tasked with procuring the group virgins (“It’s their favorite food!”), whom he sources locally by finding a college medieval LARP (live-action role-playing) group. One member, Jenna (Beanie Feldstein), takes the vampires to be LARPers themselves.

Which, in a sense, they are. A bit like the Chechen mobsters in HBO’s “Barry,” the vamps of “Shadows” seem to be cosplaying themselves, comically performing a received, pop-culture idea of scary-sexiness. (Nandor prepares himself for a special occasion by putting on body glitter, “like ‘Twilight’!”)

In reality, they’re underachievers, more bark than bite. (There is some bite, though, the episodes of violence played for over-the-top, blood-spritzing slapstick effect.) When an ancient overlord shows up to find out why the Staten Island vampires haven’t yet conquered the new world, it provides the (presumably) ongoing story line for the series.

As in the film version, the action is captured by a documentary film crew, though the device recedes more into the background (as it did in long-running mockumentary series like “Modern Family” and “Parks and Recreation”).

But the series retains the screwball-vérité look established in the film by Clement and Waititi, combining naturalistic shaky-cam with exaggerated levitation effects. In an age of inkily-lit cable dramas, this is the rare series where the nighttime palette actually makes sense.

The big question early on is whether most of the best jokes have already been told. The vampires’ feud with an aggro band of werewolves played out better in the film, which focused on the lycanthropes’ embarrassed efforts to control their transformations. But the show comes together in the fourth episode, in which the housemates trek to a nightclub in Manhattan — “Manhatta” in Laszlo’s archaic tongue — to impress a sleazy downtown vampire (Nick Kroll).

If “Shadows” doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun. Its pleasures are in the goofy details, like the way Laszlo exclaims “Bat!” as he transforms into one, or the vampire nightclub in which the equivalent of bottle service is waiters carrying a human body on a bed of ice.

I’m still not sure whether there’s a long run of TV in this resurrected premise. But there seem to be some tasty drops left before it’s entirely sucked dry.

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“What We Do in the Shadows”

Wednesday on FX

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.