It Feels Too Early to End What We Do in the Shadows

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What We Do in the Shadows wraps up its sixth and final season on FX tonight, and it feels way too soon. This season hasn’t been noticeably worse than any of the others, and a recent poll of 20 TV critics determined it was the second best show of 2024. (Okay, yes, it was our poll—obviously it’s our poll.) Quality’s always up for debate but people still clearly love the show, so why wrap it up now?

No TV show lasts forever, but a couple that are on the air right now seem destined to try: The Simpsons, which might be able to pull it off if people cotton to the inevitable change in voice actors, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which hasn’t really slipped despite airing 16 seasons across 20 years. We’re not going to mention The Simpsons again—it’s still on but hasn’t been that great since last century—but Always Sunny is a great comparison for What We Do in the Shadows. First off, they’re on the same network (basically—I think Always Sunny still calls the totally unnecessary spinoff channel FXX home, but most people probably watch both shows via Hulu at this point and not basic cable), so FX is clearly okay with auto-renewing its defining comedies. Secondly, both shows are about monsters—Shadows literally, whereas Sunny’s far more beastly characters are only figuratively monsters. Four male leads, one female, almost all of them total self-involved assholes… they’re basically the same show, only one is about vampires in Staten Island, and the other is about something even scarier: Philadelphians in Philadelphia.

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(Curb Your Enthusiasm, a third comedy that seemed destined to run indefinitely, claims to have run its final season this year, but I don’t think anybody will believe it’s truly over as long as Larry David is alive and mentally and physically capable of making more.)

One thing potentially holding Shadows back, and maybe making its creative team feel like it’s time to bring the show to a close, is that its vampires don’t show a lot of growth from season to season. That’s perhaps the most impressive thing about Always Sunny; it’s been able to develop The Gang over the last 20 years without losing sight of their core character traits and the dynamic that makes the show work. That’s easier to do with humans aging from their late 20s into their late 40s than with literally ageless vampires who have been around for centuries. Shadows essentially resets after each season, with only Harvey Guillén’s human familiar Guillermo growing and changing year-to-year. (Part of what makes Shadows so marvelous is that, despite its unrealistic milieu, it and Guillén have made Guillermo a nuanced, grounded character more than capable of shouldering the vast majority of its emotional burden.) It probably feels limiting to a writer to have characters who are inherently incapable of change, even in a show that puts comedy over emotion.

The real reason What We Do in the Shadows is ending probably comes down to money, of course. If FX really wanted to make another season happen, they’d find a way to do so. Given its practical effects and elaborate sets, it has to be more expensive to shoot than Always Sunny, even if it substitutes Toronto for New York City. And Shadows’ cast (which remains perfect as always this season) didn’t create it and don’t get producer credits, so they probably aren’t as compelled to keep it going as Sunny’s creator-stars are. Almost every TV show hits a point where it’s simply not profitable enough to keep it going anymore, and given the collapse of basic cable, the decrease in syndication revenue streams, and the attrition that typically drags down every show’s ratings and attention, What We Do in the Shadows has to be on that cusp, if it hasn’t already gone over it.

Still, though: creatively it’s about as good as it’s ever been. The sixth season has seen a couple of slightly subpar episodes, but for the most part showrunner Paul Simms (who created Newsradio, a show that could be hyped up by critics for a century and still not receive enough praise) and his writing staff remain on top of their game. Two episodes in particular, the Warriors-inspired riff from earlier this month and the one that introduced Steve Coogan as the ghost of Laszlo (Matt Berry) Cravensworth’s dad, are as good as the show’s ever been. And the season-long subplot of Guillermo working for a private equity firm (headed up by guest star Tim Heidecker doing his best finance bro impression) is both inspired and consistently funny.

The show is actually better than it probably needs to be at this point, which is one reason why it seems too early to end it. Lesser shows have coasted for seasons on the good will built up by lesser casts. Kayvan Novak, Natasia Demetriou, Mark Proksch, Berry and Guillén haven’t slipped a bit over six seasons, and Demetriou in particular has done some of her absolute best work on the show this year. Novak continues to mine the sad, puppy dog-esque core of his 14th century Middle Eastern warlord character Nandor for both maximum laughs and emotion, and Proksch’s bit as a stultifyingly dull energy vampire has never gotten old. Hell, Berry could just say words into a camera for a whole season and most viewers would probably be thoroughly entertained.

Unless everybody involved wanted to get out before the show started to slip, there’s no obvious creative reason to wrap it up at this point. So, again, it most likely has to be about the money. At the end of the day, that’s pretty much why every decision gets made in Hollywood, or business in general. It’s boring, it’s mundane, but it’s how these things go, even for shows as special as this one. Hopefully tonight’s last episode ends What We Do in the Shadows on an appropriate high, preserving its rep as one of the most consistently great TV shows of its era.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.