shadowscast

Posted by Erin Harrington

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/12/emmys-watch-2025-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-nothing-ever-changes-but-yet-it-does

‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

Throughout the six seasons of FX’s vampire mockumentary sitcom What We Do in the Shadows (2019-2025), there is a recurring refrain: “nothing ever changes.” The show, created by Jemaine Clement and building on Clement and Taika Waititi’s New Zealand film What We Do in the Shadows (2014), is set in a rambling house in Staten Island and follows the daily lives of four vampire housemates: Persian warlord Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak); married couple Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), an English dandy, and Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetrious), a Greek Romani peasant; and American energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), who lives in the basement and feeds by irritating and boring other people. The immigrant vampires arrived in Staten Island by boat, tasked with taking over the new world by Baron Afanas (Doug Jones), but were too lazy and incompetent to advance beyond conquering their street (and half of Ashley Street); Colin just came with the house. Nandor’s long-suffering and hypercompetent familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) provides a link to the mortal world. His intimate relationship with Nandor and his desire to become a vampire himself offers the show emotional stakes and a narrative throughline.

Like its precursor, Shadows riffs lovingly on the history of vampire media and the absurdities spawned by placing ridiculous characters with high opinions of themselves in banal settings. More interestingly, the formal demands of episodic, longform storytelling quicky butt up against vampiric torpor in curious ways, just as the mockumentary form creates unexpected opportunities to enrich the show’s themes. For the vampires, time is effectively infinite, so boredom and indifference easily set in. Similarly, the repetitive nature of the sitcom format demands episodes that move from order to disorder and back again but limits the amount of character and narrative development that can happen over seasons or shows. Guillermo complains about the vampires’ inability to change, the mess in the house, and the “Groundhog Day” like sense of inertia that comes when you’re surrounded by indifferent immortals.

Nonetheless, What We Do in the Shadows becomes a fascinating exercise in comic storytelling as it takes a well-worn “fish out of water” (or out of time) narrative common to comic vampire media (Bacon 2022) and finds ways to prompt (and sometimes comment on) character and narrative development in the face of formal and vampiric stagnation – something very visible now that the show has wrapped after six highly acclaimed seasons. Shadows is notable for many things: its rich world-building; its terrific production design; its enthusiastic and capacious attitudes towards diverse sexualities; its contributions to vampire lore; its genre hybridity; its international creative and production teams, which result in a unique combination of different national approaches to humour; its melding of the comic and the gothic; its combination of scripted and improvised material. But it is its awareness of its own form, and the strengths and limitations of that form, and formula, that particularly mark the show’s intelligence.

The rubber band ping of a return from chaos to stasis becomes its own kind of comic engine. Each season the setting is the same, but the characters have individual arcs, goals, or preoccupations that drive the situations. Nandor wants a wife (and gets one and regrets it).  Nadja decides to open a night club (and does and ruins it). Laszlo wants to go full mad scientist and build a monster (and succeeds but then must look after it). The vampires ascend to the Vampire Council, with the support of The Guide (Kristin Schall), but renege on their duties. They travel overseas but return home again, or they grow bored with their new hobbies. They run up against old foes and nurture never-ending grudges. In the spirit of playful Gothic “bizzarchitecture,” the “vampire residence” seems to grow bigger and bigger on the inside as new rooms or spaces are discovered.

The show has also been prone to some odd resets, as entire storylines from earlier seasons are not quite retconned but certainly discarded. In season two, Colin, subject to his own peculiar and unknown biological life cycle, ails and dies. In season three he is reborn, and raised through adolescence by Laszlo, before arriving at adulthood with no memory of the transition. (This wryly points to the way sitcoms that are stuck in a rut might shake things up with the introduction of a baby.) The ideological impulse under the sitcom format structurally may be seen as conservative, falling back into the familiar and unable to get traction on meaningful change, leaving its subjects to make do and accept their lot (Mintz 1985). Here that rhythm, and those limitations, enrich an understanding of the vampires’ immortality (and their uselessness!) and form the series’ comic underpinnings.

This creates problems for Guillermo, who offers the audience an emotional anchor. Queer, misunderstood, shy, low status, and full of want, Guillermo starts the series desperate to become a vampire and to be recognised as an equal, if only oblivious Nandor will recognise his potential and grant his wish. It’s a “will they, won’t they” storyline, ripped straight from the romantic comedy playbook (Lord and Hogan 2024), but there is something a little tragic about Guillermo’s character development over the seasons. He learns that he comes from a long line of vampire hunters, which puts him at odds with his beloved master. He is “promoted” from familiar to bodyguard (with very few changes in duties) and eventually has his wish granted, but he struggles with his new vampire identity. He seems to have a closer connection to the film crew than the vampires, but his vulnerabilities are more on display. More than anyone, he finds himself back where he started. The vampires are happy in their elastic afterlife, but Guillermo chafes against various thwarted ambitions. His frustration that nothing ever changes becomes resignation, until he’s able to engage in some drastic soul-searching that honours his character’s vulnerabilities; physician, heal thyself. A dynamic that could be seen as repressive, or even a sideways act of queerbaiting, takes on a different and more complex cast.

These beats and returns manifest in other ways. One of Shadows’s most striking contributions has been its approach to mockumentary. The 2014 film framed itself as an expose of a secret society of the undead, in which the intrepid crew, sometimes protected by crucifixes, gained access to something secret and dangerous. The series, too, is framed as an ongoing documentary about vampires, although for whom (and why) is never really answered. For the most part, the series adopts the conventions of what Brett Mills (2004) has described as “cinema verité.” This refers to a style of situation comedy that embraces the language of observational, fly-on-the-wall documentaries for narrative, comic and aesthetic effect. This includes shows like The Office, Parks and Recreation, or Abbott Elementary, which draw from the conventions of documentary form. These shows combine “candid” and hand-held footage and techniques (such as obvious, clumsy zooms) with cutaways and direct-to-camera interviews, even if they are also highly selective in the ways that they acknowledge the diegetic presence of the cameras or even the rationale for the crew’s presence. In What We Do in the Shadows, these features work to fabricate a sense of factuality that comes into comic friction with the show’s ridiculous conceit – namely, that we are following the filming of a “real” documentary (of sorts) about actual vampires who exist relatively normally in the “real world.” This is enriched by the series’ frequent use of other fabricated or altered media, such as paintings and photographs, to establish the vampires’ history and relationships.

As the series progresses, this form offers creative opportunities. Characters frequently engage with the diegetic camera (and the unseen crew), and therefore the audience, in a manner that heightens dramatic and situational irony, and occasionally drives the narrative.  It contributes to the vampires’ characterisation, notably that they are quite happy to be tailed by a crew because they are both naïve and narcissistic; why wouldn’t people want to see the minutiae of vampires’ everyday lives? Over time, the series incorporates other forms of (found) footage in novel ways, including material from surveillance and security cameras, local government meetings, video conferences, social media, behind-the-scenes material, news broadcasts, and – most impressively, in the season 4 episode “Go Flip Yourself” – reality television.

In the final season, this becomes delightfully meta, as in a narrative arc which follows Guillermo into a job at a shady venture capital firm, where his terrible boss is convinced the camera crew is there for him – much to the amusement of the vampires. In the episode “P I Undercover: New York” (season 6, episode 8), the vampires discover that their street and the exterior of the “vampire residence” have been appropriated by a television film crew who are filming a crime police procedural. Nandor and Laszlo must balance their anger at the disruption (including a crew truck damaging their backyard) with Guillermo’s fandom of the show, but despite declaring war on the crew, they become increasingly invested in being involved behind the scenes. Beyond the overt visibility of the workings of a television show, there’s a deeper joke here too, about hyperreality and representation in film locations. The show within a show is using Staten Island to stand in for elsewhere in New York, even as establishing shots of the exterior of the vampire residence are Cranfield House in Riverdale in season 1, then of the Jared S Torrance House in South Pasadena, with other exteriors filmed on a set in Toronto, all of it “authentically” captured by the fictional crew.

This all pays off beautifully in the show’s well-pitched final episode, which finally addresses, head on, the show’s guiding conceit. It’s a finale about a finale, which also intertextually references another notable television finale about the nature of televisual reality. It finally interrogates the role that the presence of the documentary crew has had on the lives of the vampires, who are perhaps more media savvy than we have given them credit for, and on Guillermo in particular, given his various identity crises. It asks questions about how we fashion ourselves for the screen and how this impacts our sense of self. For the vampires, maybe this has just been another entertaining diversion; for Guillermo, maybe not. It’s an impressive and deeply satisfying play that ensures that Shadows ends meaningfully on its own terms, while honouring its sitcom and mockumentary forms – something that rarely happens in comparable shows.

This conclusion challenges other comparable shows to make more of the mockumentary format. Here, it is something that informs narrative, theme and character. I can drive action, rather than just respond to it – especially as this resolution asks challenging questions about what it is that Guillermo has wanted all along. In the world of story, perhaps nothing ever changes, but in terms of its wider cultural impact, What We Do in the Shadows has certainly changed a lot.

Works Cited

Bacon, Simon. “Introduction.” Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy, edited by Simon Bacon, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2022, pp. 12–35.

Lord, Kristin, and Kourtnea Hogan. “Gay Vampires: Metaphor, the Erotic and Homophobia in Film and Televison.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, edited by Simon Bacon, Springer International Publishing, 2024, pp. 1087–102, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36253-8_47.

Mills, Brett. “Comedy Verite: Contemporary Sitcom Form.” Screen, vol. 45, no. 1, Mar. 2004, pp. 63–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/45.1.63.

Mintz, Lawrence E. “Ideology in the Television Situation Comedy.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 8, no. 2, 1985, pp. 42–51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23412949.

Biography

Erin Harrington is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in critical and cultural theory in the English department of the University of Canterbury Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she coordinates the Cultural Studies programme. She is the author of Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (Routledge 2018), and has published on topics including female-directed horror anthologies, New Zealand horror, horror comedy, horror and theatre, and connections between horror and contemporary art practice. She is currently completing a monograph on transnational comedy horror, mockumentary form, and the What We Do in the Shadows universe for Auteur (Liverpool University Press). She sits on the editorial boards of the peer-reviewed journal Horror Studies and Edinburgh University Press’s 21st Century Horror series. She also sits on the board of trustees of the books and ideas festival WORD Christchurch and appears regularly as an arts critic and commentator.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/9/12/emmys-watch-2025-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-nothing-ever-changes-but-yet-it-does