Zach Woods and a terrible dinner party make for half of a great What We Do In The Shadows

Tonight’s episode of What We Do In The Shadows, “P.I. Undercover: New York,” is a textbook example of the importance of character in a long-running comedy—for both good and ill. On the one hand, the episode’s title plot, which sees Staten Island invaded by the crew of a TV crime show, is borderline insubstantial, mostly because it doesn’t give Laszlo, Nandor, and Guillermo much more to do than fawn over (the admittedly great) Kevin Pollak and make some meta jokes about TV production. By contrast, the episode’s B-plot, which teams up Colin and Nadja for a transcendently awkward dinner date, makes for some of the best comedy of the season. And it all comes down to the fundamental loneliness of Colin Robinson.

Colin has always been the odd man out in the show’s main cast, not just thanks to his Energy Vampire weirdness, but also because he doesn’t have a built-in scene partner like Nandor and Guillermo or Laszlo and Nadja. The show has addressed this disconnect handily over the years (and frequently milked it for comedy), most especially by giving Mark Proksch and Matt Berry multiple scenes and storylines together across the seasons. But the fact remains: For all his prickishness, there’s a weird vulnerability to Colin Robinson that Proksch has become an expert at deploying for comedy, and it’s what makes tonight’s dinner party—which sees our favorite life sucker desperate to reconnect with an old human buddy, Joel (Zach Woods)—such squeamish fun. As it becomes increasingly clear that Joel’s wife Becky is, against all odds, madly in love (or at least lust) with Colin, Proksch makes the most of his unlikely straight-man duties, awkwardly fending off advances that ultimately escalate into Joel desperately asking Colin to fuck his wife. (“If it’s any consolation, I’ll be there the whole time, I’ll have—” “It’s no consolation.”)

Nadja, meanwhile, shows off her ultimate utility player status, serving as Colin’s wingman for the evening for no other reason than a strong desire to try out her latest human small talk on Joel and Becky. As a huge fan of Nadja’s human impression in general, that would be enough for me—especially after Colin gets the line of the episode by describing her as “a nightmare in a Civil War ghost’s dress.” But Natasia Demetriou also shows off her remarkable ability to bring out the best in each of her castmates, making the rare Nadja-Colin pairing a surprisingly good fit. (The secret sauce, I suspect, is self-awareness; it’s why she and Guillermo bounce so well off of each other, too.) Nadja mostly spends the episode on the sidelines, observing the fucked-up dynamics at play (and occasionally participating, as she and Colin try unsuccessfully to figure out an appropriate level of PDA for their boyfriend-girlfriend ruse). But the plot-line also wouldn’t work without her, as she runs interference on the escalating tensions, and she and Colin find themselves the most normal people in the room for once in their eternal un-lives.

Which is as good a time for a brief digression in praise of Woods and especially Kim Quindlen, who do a great job of illustrating the miserableness of Joel and Becky’s marriage without going full Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?. Woods is an old hand at this sort of dead-eyed, bitter misery, of course, while Quindlen does a great job at pulling a slow burn with her character; we assume, coming in, that she’s got some deep-seated hatred for Colin (because he’s Colin), so the reveal that her feelings are running in the opposite direction is smartly executed. (Among other things, she successfully sells the prospect of a woman being sexually and emotionally attracted to Colin Robinson. No small feat.) The whole setup makes for a fun dynamic that I’d happily have taken a full episode of…and not just because the set of P.I. Undercover: New York is such a snooze.

Sure, there’s a little bit of fun to be had in Nandor and Laszlo’s adventures in show business, most especially in Shadows‘ always enjoyable use of violence, with Nandor, and later Nadja executing quick kills on PAs who get in their way. More often than not, though, this half of the episode feels like the show is leaning on what I sometimes think of as the Matt Berry Effect, i.e., the idea that Berry is so funny that anything you have him say will land, even if he’s just rattling off winky jokes about how directors and writers are the real heart of a TV show or an extended description of a “sweated shirt.” But even Berry’s legendary charisma and oddball deliveries can’t do much with lines that don’t satirize TV production so much as they just…describe it. The plot-line tries to gin up a bit of conflict by having Guillermo be an improbably huge fan of the series in question and by having Nandor and Laszlo get into a fight over the aforementioned shirt. But it’s a story of such minuscule impact that not even having neighbor Sean show up to wax nostalgic about all the famous piss that’s been in his house’s pipes can make it more than a distraction from the good stuff. Which, thankfully, was really good—enough, even, to excuse a pretty stale extended Sex And The City joke that finishes out the whole episode.

Stray observations

• • As a fan of delightful Canadian hockey comedy Shoresy, I was unduly excited to see Ryan “Michaels” McDonnell as the guy Nandor kills. (Also, both of those murders are really well executed; the speed, and then the bounces, amp up the physical comedy.)
• • “We’re just in the middle of shooting something.” “Oh, very cool! What are we shooting? Dogs? Criminals?”
• • Colin Robinson reads a comment deriding/praising PIUNY as “winsomely compelling copaganda”—only to realize it’s one of his own sock puppets.
• • “What’s up, you creamy snake? All dressed up like a bowl of… millet.”
• • Examples of Nadja’s “deliciously mild” human small talk: “Hey, hon. Love that top! Where is it from? Online? Great! I love online.” “My allergies are bonkers today, a-sneezing, sneezing, sneezing.” “I think I’m gonna go low-key for my birthday this year.” And, of course, “I did the Harris Potter quiz and I got Slytherin. Ohhhh.”
• • It’s always fun to be reminded that somewhere out there is a person whose job it is to create black-and-white zine drawings of Kevin Pollak with a very open shirt.
• • Joel, meeting Nadja: “I can never tell if people are on drugs.”
• • Laszlo intends to “lay waste to their video village.”
• • Also, Lasz dropping out of the sky in a chef’s hat, offering Pollak “a meal…a succulent Chinese meal” is pretty good.
• • “I do not get you at all.”
• • That’s actual episode director Kyle Newacheck as the director of the show-within-the-show, by the way.
• • There is some amazing facial acting from Proksch in the “I need you to fuck my wife” scene.
• • “Hey, Joel, maybe next week we could go bowling?” “Yeah! That’d be great, just boys time, and then you come back and fuck my wife.”
• • Tonight in “acknowledging the camera”: Joel tries to get the camera crew to pick up where Colin Robinson left off.
• • Cute touch during Laszlo and Nandor’s fight: Cutting over to the trailer mirror to show off the lack of reflections.