What We Do In The Shadows: These flatshare vampires are enjoyably daft but their jokes need more bite

Abandon any Buffy comparisons - this comedy is more like Seinfeld or Spaced ★★★✩✩
Vamping it up: Natasia Demetriou as Nadja is adept at withering expressions in this spin-off series from the 2014 film
BBC/FX Productions

By this stage in the global pandemic, with anger boiling over and no end in sight, you would be forgiven for craving a bit of mindless humour.

Even better, some jokes that draw on the petty frustrations that might have been building up about whoever you have been cooped up with, and how much washing up they have been doing.

So the second series of What We Do in the Shadows has come at just the right time. It may be about vampires but abandon all Buffy or Twilight comparisons: it’s more like Spaced or a Seinfeld — a silly, surreal flatshare comedy. But because it’s about vampires the costumes are better.

Based on Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s 2014 film, it is a mockumentary about four vampires who came to New York to conquer North America. Two hundred years later, they haven’t made it past Staten Island and they’re getting on each other’s nerves. It has one of the best theme tunes on TV — the incongruously jaunty You’re Dead by Sixties singer Norma Tanega, accompanied by photographs of the vampires pulling funny faces through the ages.

BBC/FX Productions

We find them exhausted — husband and wife Lazlo and Nadja (Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou) are having trouble hanging on to a familiar. They’ve been through seven in the last few months. Finally they’ve found a keeper, Topher (Haley Joel Osment, the child from The Sixth Sense all grown up and referring to people as “dawg”), but is he too good to be true?

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Guillermo, who is the other house familiar, working for Nandor (Kayvan Novak), is suspicious that Topher isn’t taking this job seriously enough. To compound their stress there’s a vampire assassin on the loose. The writing isn’t as sharp as it was in the film, but the first series took a while to get into its stride too and the performances are endearing enough that it’s still entertaining.

Nandor was a fighter in the Ottoman Empire but can’t make his housemates tidy the fridge. Berry plays a version of his Toast of London character, making rude gags at any opportunity, and Demetriou brings the spirit of her brother’s show Stath Lets Flats — which she is in too — using malapropisms to comic effect.

As well as her winning turn of phrase, she is particularly adept at withering expressions, while Berry’s skill is saying things like “knob lord” in booming aristocratic tones.

As long as you don’t take this show, or indeed yourself, too seriously, it’s an enjoyably daft escape. It’s good to have the vamps back. I’m just hoping their humour gets a bit more full-blooded as the series continues.

What We Do In The Shadows airs on BBC2, tonight at 10pm and 10.25pm

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