So, there’s a lot to say about “What We Do in the Shadows”’s return, like how they figured out an amazing way to keep growing Harvey Guillén’s vampire hunter arc (as he is a vampire’s familiar) and how the show uses a time jump (summer is over, so we get some exposition—unclear if the show was supposed to air in a fall or it’s just a plot device), but the big deal of the episode is Haley Joel Osment.
Osment plays Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou’s new familiar—their last ones kept getting killed off—and he’s a terrible coworker for Guillén. Osment plays on his phone while Guillén does all the work. Guillén is up all night every night killing off the Max Schreck Nosferatu assassins who are after Berry, Demetriou, and Guillén’s master, Kayvan Novak, for some shenanigans last season. And hiding it from them because then they’ll know he’s a vampire hunter.
There’s this great bit about him eating chocolate covered espresso beans to stay up, which Novak thinks are his dried turds. It’s really funny. Excellent script from Marika Sawyer.
Anyway, the setup isn’t Osment being a crappy coworker to Guillén but Osment dying—just like all of Berry and Demetriou’s familiars, only instead of just burying him in the yard, they take him to neighborhood necromancer Benedict Wong.
Wong’s hilarious, selling tchotchkes in his shop and scatting through his incantations to bring Osment back. Now, Demetriou believes in necromancy, but Berry doesn’t, so there’s a bunch of griping Berry, which is wonderful as always.
Only Wong’s legit and Osment’s risen…
Only he’s a zombie.
And none of the vampires believe Guillén. So there are all these chase sequences throughout the house, with Osment just as funny undead as alive. He’s not a regular familiar who wants to be turned into a vampire, it’s just a cool side gig while waits for his 0.5% ownership of a microbrewer to pay-off. Like, it’s awesome stuff. Sawyer gives Osment all this great material and he nails it all.
So good.
It’s downright lovely to have the show back. Just what it needs to be. Novak, Demetriou, and Berry are all great too but it’s really Guillén and Osment’s episode.
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