What We Do in the Shadows (TV) main character POLL

Just catching up with this season - I found the first two episodes a bit disappointing, somewhat hectic and overstuffed. The third episode in Atlantic City I absolutely loved. I realise I much prefer the episodes where the vampires engage with banal aspects of the modern world to the baroque vampiric council world building ones.

one real asset this show has is all four main vampires are played by people who could make you laugh just reading the phonebook

I found this whole season a real drag. It just got worse and worse as it went along. Kind of hoping it doesn't come back, tbh, and I say that as someone who absolutely adored the first two seasons.

Kind of agree - the things that were good were retreads of previous seasons, the beats that were new were not good (idg what they did with Laszlo's character at all)

i thought the ending was real dumb but i am also old enough to be triggered by anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of “the dancing baby”

it should have ended on the prev episode imo

the whole season was just so plotty

I think everyone (including tv showrunners) is just doing the best they can to navigate the pandemic and it's probably advisable not to judge any product of this accursed time too harshly. Everything is compromised as hell right now.

Like there's probably a sizable book to be written about the creative compromises people have had to make to get entertainment out into the world over the past two years.

true

I thought the show was fine this season.

I still enjoyed it but the scripts felt a lot more uh...haphazardly edited. it felt like they wrote a lot of plotlines that were later removed but still referenced here and there. the show's pacing was much less tight and the tone whipped around a lot. too much gross out humor as a whole. also their special effects budget didn't quite seem to match some of the things they were trying to do. that said it had as many laugh out loud moments as other seasons and I still looked forward to watching it every week

I would not doubt that so many episodes not having all the main characters together was working around schedules etc. tied to Covid.

I think everyone (including tv showrunners) is just doing the best they can to navigate the pandemic and it's probably advisable not to judge any product of this accursed time too harshly. Everything is compromised as hell right now.

Maybe, but it didn't seem so much like a lack of resources as a lack of ideas. Maybe Jemaine was a bigger part of the day-to-day success of the show than we all gave him credit for. Maybe Natasha Demetriou is just exhausted (it certainly did seem to me like they were shooting around a pregnancy in some of the episodes, and this season of Stath Lets Flats isn't good either), and everyone will be back with a bang next year. I hope so.

this season of Stath Lets Flats isn't good either

Disagree.

but this season did have kayvan novak doing a matt berry impression as he tried to seduce a woman by playing a lute cover of “peg”

agree that this season was good but def getting too overcrowded and plotty for my taste, making me nervous about the next season (especially if the characters are all going to be split up with separate plotlines taking place in separate locations?) like i laughed really hard at all the new baron stuff but in the end i was glad he kinda disappeared again bc i didnt want to have to deal with a whole new baron storyline on top of everything else.

would be totally fine with the show leaning more into just being a low-stakes situation comedy. i dont know why so many streaming-era sitcoms have to get so elaborate and complicated, idgaf about the character arcs of the imaginary vampires, let it just be The Munsters with swears & horror gore.

the show works best when it uses its supernatural elements to enhance sitcommy plots, like that aforementioned showcase for novak.

i still liked this season tho, especially the atlantic city episode and the one with the sire on the loose, and i'm not opposed to world-expanding.

Maybe, but it didn't seem so much like a lack of resources as a lack of ideas.

I think the issue with COVID beyond logistical problems is that people are half-crazy and depressed. It's not easy to write well when you're like that!

My favorite of these so far pic.twitter.com/m75J66QO0K

— Zack Budryk (@BudrykZack) November 20, 2021

one real asset this show has is all four main vampires are played by people who could make you laugh just reading the phonebook

yet they focus so much of the show on familiar dude, who is not a good actor and is not funny and i could give a flying fuck about the sam and diane-ing of him getting a be a vamplire or not. just show me vampires going clubbing and im happy.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Ahhh just watched the first episode of season 4...does it get better? It just wasn't very funny to me. I only let out a small chuckle after the bit about Laszlo's projection TV. Each season has been a little worse than the previous, imo. (Loved the movie, loved season one...)

I haven't had access to watch it yet, but meanwhile season 3 of Wellington Paranormal is the best so far.

I laughed at the Guide/Guillermo stuff in ep 2 but not feeling the Nandor stuff at all.

Not Colin Robinson is amusing at times, like in the museum, but otherwise not so much.

Preadolescent Colin Robinson was an utter delight in this week's episode. Dodgy FX aside.

otm

Thanks all - I'll stay with it at least for a few more episodes...

Fred Armisen is pretty much leaning into the jazz as object of comedic ridicule thing a bit much now, don't you think?

Definitely noticing a lot of “lol jazz is the worst” bits in shows I’m recent years, it does seem to have replaced ska as the go-to punchline music genre for comedy writers

I blame the Boosh

maybe I'm just not feeling it but this season hasn't been as good

the actors seem to mostly be trying to work with what they've been given, but it's too little

Yeah it’s not as good as it used to be but seeing Mark Proksch’s face on a little kid’s body is hilarious/unnerving.

watching this season, everything just moves so fast, they hurry through every scene, its edited within an inch of its life and feels like theyre just constantly rushing to get to the next plot beat. even scenes that are just two people talking look like a michael bay movie sometimes with the avalanche of shots and fast cuts. a lot of the jokes seem like they're overdubbed in at the very last moment before a change to a new scene. theres very little room for performance and delivery which imho is the shows main comedic strength. the stuff with nandor negotiating his penis wish with the djinn was one of the few times i've really laughed this season, mostly bc its just a really funny idea for a scene and seeing those three actors all play it straight was really fun to watch. but there are just so many plots and little stories going on for every character in every episode simultaneously that they just have way too much narrative business to get through in 22 minutes.

they had a whole setup that had been carefully constructed last season with room for each of them to explore their own character, new connections, new storylines. then they said nope, threw all that out and had nadja open a vampire club. show has gotten bad.

I wonder if the budget got squashed or the real life set conditions made them throw the whole gang back together in the house immediately. I figure we’d get a few episodes of solo nonsense, maybe a Jackie Daytona type of thing, and instead we got flooded basement

only watched the first two and yeah it's super weird they ended on such a wild cliffhanger only to go "eh, never mind" within 5 minutes

episode #2 was really good though, Nandor resurrecting all his dead wives was hilarious and the accountant genie was great

I did laugh at the entire “yes, some of my wives are men” moment

yeah all the stuff with nandor is the only stuff that is working for me this season comedy-wise. all the business with nadja, lazlo, kristen schaal, and guillermo has fallen flat for me and seemed like busywork w/not a lot of jokes. even with baby colin robinson, the visual of mark proksch's head on a childs body is very funny but they havent really delivered on the premise very much imho

ok, the night market episode was a little rushed at the beginning but I thought it was funny. the wraith negotiation scene!

first episode was shaky but #2-4 had a lot of funny scenes. the MC for the familiar fights was really funny. the thing with this show is that you kinda have to watch it with captions - Natasia Demetriou and Kristin Schaal lay on such thick accents that I can't tell what they're saying half the time. and when the captions are on you see a bunch of lines that are pretty funny but are basically inaudible.

kristen schaal has been very funny this season, i'm glad she's getting more to do.

don't think the show is bad per se, but it's definitely not delivering the laughs as regularly. i did crack up every time i heard the name "richie suck"

it's only taken me a week to realise that the reason I don't recognise any of these plot lines is you're all talking about a brand new season.

I was looking up something about the show the other day and was reminded of the fact that someone had to re-edit Natasia Demetriou's wikipedia page to adhere to the guidelines, because she uploaded her own wiki picture

It's a very good picture
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natasia_Demetriou,_What_We_Do_in_The_Shadows,_2019.jpg

Watching now, and Nandor’s face lift is just getting better and better!

Lmao @ Nandor “I have not slept for a week because I keep thinking of ideas for the perfect wedding”

**Cut to Nandor in his coffin writing “WEDING CAKE” in a notebook**

The episodes from the night market on have been much better. I like all the legalistic stuff with the djinn and I really enjoyed Nadja trying to be friends with Gizmo's family. Still not as good as it used to be, but at the end of the last season I was only watching out of habit, and now I'm actively enjoying it again.

hat’s still cursed

I just heard "Emotional Rescue" on the radio, and now I'm dying to hear Jagger's monologue at the end performed by Nandor.

Good little piece by Harvey Guillén who plays Guillermo:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a40907282/harvey-guillen-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-coming-out/

Matt Berry did a What's In My Bag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HuNNPoAGvQ

ILX may be interested to know that the last record he picks is Cluster II. "It sounds like electronic nightmares. I highly recommend it."