From the beginning of vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, loyal vampire familiar Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén) has wanted one thing: to become a full-fledged vampire himself. After a lot of being strung along by Nandor and the other vampires, Guillermo took matters into his own hands at the end of season 4 and got another vampire to turn him, with season 5 all about dealing with the ramifications of that. While it started as an interesting conflict, the back and forth between Guillermo and the rest of the vampires got a bit tired.
But thankfully, in its final season, What We Do in the Shadows has decided to bury that plot point and introduce Guillermo to new bloodthirsty ambitions: climbing the corporate ladder at a Wall Street finance firm.
What We Do in the Shadows is now a workplace comedy. And it rules.
The show’s always been at its best when the vampires clash wildly with Regular Normal Human Things, be it attending Super Bowl parties or participating in a home renovation show. But the past few seasons have started getting a little too in the weeds with the supernatural shenanigans to the point where all the characters started to feel too out of touch. And that all came to a head with Guillermo in particular, who’d always been the gang’s touchpoint for Regular Normal Things; shoving him into the forefront of the supernatural ends up undermining what makes his character so funny.
The show needed a bit of a revamp (ba-dum tss).
Season 6 isn’t a total departure. There are certainly still more of the same supernatural hijinks, like Laszlo’s quest to reanimate the dead. But the best parts of this season have focused on Guillermo’s new path as a venture capitalist at Cannon Capital, after he gets promoted from a mailroom job (thanks in part to Nadja’s meddling). Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Nandor (Kayvan Novak) both take up jobs at Cannon Capital in order to keep an eye on Guillermo (which they insist is so he doesn’t fall into a post-familiar-life rage and kill them, but is also probably because they care). Dumping all of them into an ecosystem of finance bros was the funniest path the show could’ve taken.
Few people bat (ha ha) an eye at Nadja, who approaches the business world with her signature ruthlessness. But Nandor, who’s decided to take up a custodial job, sticks out — partially because he’s just weird, but also because his idea of cleaning up involves soaking up spills with a fully intact paper towel roll. We’re familiar with Guillermo scrambling to make excuses for the vampires; but now he’s doing that while trying to climb up the corporate ladder. It’s the same dynamics in a fresh new setting — and that’s just satisfying to see play out.
The best example of this is Guillermo himself. On the surface, he seems vastly different from the Guillermo we know, now that he’s talking about clubbing and dining out at fancy steakhouses with shareholders. But it’s actually no big surprise that he takes to the world of finance with alarming gusto, defending his boss’s morally dubious capitalistic ventures without a second thought. After all, he spent the past 15 years doing the same thing for murderous vampires, in hopes that he’d be one in the future. He’s a follower, not a leader — the exact type of dude that a finance bro would latch onto, and vice versa. And just because Guillermo is ready to swim in a new pond doesn’t mean he has lost his natural tendencies.
The cast of What We Do in the Shadows is full of big personalities. And they shine best when they’re thrust into mundane situations, so we can see them ricochet wildly. Their small corner of Staten Island had already been explored to death (OK, last one I swear). They might be failing at conquering the new world (and to be honest, I’m so thankful that the plot with their long-sleeping friend Jerry wanting to get them back on the conquering track has sort of died down). What We Do in the Shadows has done a few soft resets, like the time Nadja decided to open a vampire nightclub and how it morphed into more of a hangout show in later seasons. But the newest venture they’ve branched into is the strongest pivot yet, anchoring the show to what it does best.
New episodes of What We Do in the Shadows air Mondays on FX at 10 p.m. EST and stream on Hulu the next day.
The post What We Do in the Shadows is a workplace comedy now — for the better appeared first on Polygon.
