What We Do In The Shadows worked with HGTV to get its Property Brothers parody right

In its fourth season, What We Do In The Shadows is still full of surprises. After building up Laszlo (Matt Berry) and baby Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch)’s love of a home renovation show called Go Flip Yourself across a few other episodes, this week’s installment kicked off with twin hosts Bran and Toby Daltry (Randy and Jason Sklar) arriving in Staten Island, ready to fix up the vampires’ mansion with fake plants and a man cave.

A new deep dive from Vulture takes a look at how the FX comedy made its pitch-perfect Property Brothers parody. Naturally, the process started with a lot of research, and director Yana Gorskaya and director of photography DJ Stipsen watched hours of HGTV to prepare for the shoot.

“Our show was already documentary style, so the parallels are there in terms of the handheld look,” Gorskaya says. “But it was helpful to have conversations about how to make it look and feel different from a regular Shadows episode.”

While the genre is, let’s be honest, pretty easy to parody–does anyone actually like shiplap?–Go Flip Yourself got an extra layer of authenticity thanks to some outside help. One of the biggest laughs of the episode comes from 3-D renderings promising a drastic overhaul of the bloodsuckers’ home, with Bran describing, “And boom, we knock out all the walls, make an open concept first floor. It’s gonna create a much better flow, and, most importantly, it’s gonna bring in tons of natural light.” The graphic depicting the vampires and Guillermo in their sunny new living room came courtesy of the real Property Brothers production team. That’s not the only familiar flourish that HGTV viewers will recognize: the episode’s narration was done by Love It Or List It’s Tina Morasco.

“We wanted to sell it as much as a real reality-TV episode as we possibly could and to use people who work in those fields to help us,” Gorskaya says.

Head over to Vulture for the full behind-the-scenes report. Season four of What We Do In The Shadows is airing now on FX and streaming on Hulu.