In the musty, airless manner where most of FX’s what we do in the shadows takes place, a sole forsook, entity stands capable of change. Naturally, it isn’t the vampire- indolent Nandor, sex-obsessed Laslo (Matt berry), romance – preoccupied Nadja (Natasia Demetrios) whose eternal self- satisfaction has petrified them in a kind of existential amber.
Nor is it the life-sapping dull colin(Mark Proksch) an ” energy vampire” who despite no outward signs of otherworldliness, is governed just as much as his peers and housemates by fixed needs and regular feedings.
That leaves Guillermo ( Harvey Guillen ) the one human in the bunch. At the end of season one, portly, bespectacled Guillermo, who’s dedicated a decade of his life to serving as Nandors familiar in the hopes of being turned into a bloodsucker himself one day, discovered that fate has played a cruel joke on him. With famed vampire hunter van Helsing in his bloodline, Guillermo is more likely to kill the undead than to become one himself.
To premiers of what we do in the shadows – is powerful, immoral monster lulled into complacency by mollycoddling and nostalgic memories of their once fearsome and sexy selves -brims with so much potential that it hardly needs development. Boasting one of the best comedy casts currently on the air, the TV adaption of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 mockumentary films would have been perfectly enjoyable if it had merely continued exposing the chasm between its vampire characters epic self – conceptions and their Staten Island realities.
It’s unclear though if Guillermo has yet realized that reversal of roles. The dramatic irony adds a tense satisfaction to every scene in which familiar resentment builds against his master and their two mooching roommates – and that’s before Guillermo stumbles into a group of vampire hunters and easily bests everyone there in stacking Cape – wearing leeches in the heart.
