What We Do in the Shadows Season 4 Sharpens Its Stakes: Find Love, Start Business, Raise Baby… Profit?

This review originally published June 30, 2022.

Four seasons in, What We Do in the Shadows, FX’s vampire mockumentary from the mind of Jemaine Clement, is still one of TV’s best comedies. Through the first four episodes of the new season for review, the show effortlessly flexes and reframes its scope, tightly following its protagonists on their shared journey. The show feels somehow more intimate than (and just as vulgar as) before, as the characters’ uneven relationship with change and growth provides new opportunities for intentional and offhanded shenanigans in a story where, for once, all their motivation comes from their own wants and desire rather than pressures from outside their Staten Island residence. The jokes are still raunchy, the protagonists are still self-assured in their wit despite frequent ignorance, and the actors feel engaged and alive in their undead roles, keeping the show vibrant and laying the groundwork for the already-renewed seasons to come.

While Season 4 premieres eight months after the Season 3 finale, the plot of What We Do in the Shadows picks up after a one-year gap. Lazlo (Matt Berry) is in Staten Island letting the manor fall apart while raising the energy vampire child who burst from the chest of Colin Robinson (Mark Proschk), who he calls “Boy” in hopes of distinguishing him from his late friend. Lazlo wants him to be a much more interesting man, perhaps forgetting how energy vampires operate (he has mentioned he has much to learn about them, and I suspect surrogate fatherhood will teach him a lot). So, Lazlo trains the boy in things like fencing, burglary, and classical literature, in addition to using shock therapy, phrenology, and feeding him cereal out of a dog bowl, to mixed success. Nadja (Natasia Dimetriou) and the doll containing her soul have returned from England after butting heads with the low-level planning committee she was assigned to by the Supreme Vampiric Council. Apparently starting a vampire nightclub is something all new vampires want to do when they make it to the central bureaucracy, but not something the council is interested in.

Meanwhile, despite gaps in his emotional intelligence and general reasoning, Nandor (Kayvan Novak) is pursuing romance while showing more appreciation for his vampire hunter-descended familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who is again the only reason the whole household doesn’t physically and logistically collapse. The Guide (Kirsten Schaal) has become a series regular, accompanied by her wraiths as she navigates her own psychology with Lazlo and workplace labor issues with Nadja.

The series continues to include other non-vampiric monsters integrated into hidden alcoves and enclaves in modern society, such as an lawyerly/accountant-like djinn that Nandor discovers in a lamp among his treasures, and the myriad and sundry bartering mythical creatures at the Night Market. What We Do in the Shadows subtly builds out a dark fantasy world intersecting with the main characters’ misadventures with mundanity. This is where guest stars come in and where we get to see the creative interpretation of fables and fantasy, as well as the aged vampires setting the record straight on some popular ideas about contemporary interpretations of magical creatures—mainly Lazlo bursting Boy-Colin Robinsons’s bubble about fairies and fairy tales.