What We Do In The Shadows recap: An all-star crew of energy vampires can't liven up a dull affair

Sequel episodes are always a tricky proposition in TV: Hew too closely to the original formula and you’re trapped in a mire of diminishing returns; break with the original and then what’s even the point? It’s the reason What We Do In The Shadows has always resisted the impulse to revisit, say, Jackie Daytona: In the words of series showrunner Paul Simms, “If we try to do it again, it’ll only be 75-percent funny. People [only] think they want it.”

“The Campaign,” tonight’s lackluster installment of TV’s funniest vampire comedy, is, by our reckoning, a sequel to at least two past installments of the show—and scrapes its way up to “75-percent funny” only at its heights. The obvious touchstone here reaches all the way back to the show’s third episode, “Werewolf Feud,” with “The Campaign” reviving emotional energy vampire Evie (Vanessa Bayer) to play the foil to a suddenly-on-the-campaign-trail Colin Robinson. (We also get a callback to Laszlo’s interest in labial topiary, just to drive the parallels home.)

But “The Campaign” also serves as a sequel of sorts to “The Trial,” the big, showy first-season episode that saw series creators Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi tap their Rolodexes to fill the vengeful Vampiric Council with various bloodsucking movie stars and huge undead names. And while the members of the Supreme Council Of Energy Vampires, who kidnap Colin and Evie halfway through tonight’s episode—producing its best scenes, in the process—aren’t quite at Wesley Snipes or Tilda Swinton levels of fame, they are the kinds of names and faces that will be catnip to comedy nerd fans: Gregg Turkington, Jo Firestone, Aparna Nacherla, and Hannibal Buress all make up the rank and file of the council, while Baskets star and stand-up Martha Kelly holds court as their leader.

It’s an undeniable triumph for the show’s casting department: Each of these comics is gifted with their own distinctive voices and styles, each well-suited, with just a bit of tweaking, to the energy vampire lifestyle. Collectively, they batter Colin and Evie into submission with push notification interruptions, technical difficulties, and ceaseless mansplaining, before dropping the bomb: They need Colin to win the comptroller election he’s gotten himself involved in, despite having only joined the race because politics is a sublime opportunity to “mega-drain” people. (His opponent is threatening to destroy bureaucracy, “the lifeblood of energy vampires,” and so she’s got to go.)

The introduction of the Council is the one bold swing in an episode that otherwise tends toward the rote—for all that it’s fun to see Colin channel a horrifying hybrid of Tom Cruise and Howard Dean in an effort to be genuinely charismatic for the voters. Bayer is great here, as she was in her first episode, but there’s a certain predictability to the way her arc plays out: After Colin Jeffrey Toobins his way out of the comptroller race, Evie swoops in to take the job for herself, breaking his grey little heart all over again in the process. Mark Proksch plays these moments well, but it’s really just the resolution of “Werewolf Feud” all over again, and, even for a show as change averse as What We Do In The Shadows, repeating the same emotional beats from fully four years ago is genuinely a little much.

Meanwhile, what are we to read in to the fact that multiple plotlines tonight culminate in one of our heroes showing an unwilling participating their dick? In the case of Nandor, that means exposing himself to his new gym buddy Alexander (Robert Smigel, kind of wasted here) in an effort to show off his freshly circumcised penis to his cool new Jewish bro. (Tragically, vampire healing factor is in effect, and so Guillermo’s under-protest efforts to “snip my tip” are all for naught.) The show must obviously think it’s very funny to have Kayvan Novak say words in Yiddish in his thick Nandor accent, since it’s the only joke that happens in these scenes: “Nandor is sad because Guillermo is ignoring him” is a fine enough plot hook, generally, but there’s very little funny that happens here. (Okay, Nandor sadly reciting lines from R.E.M. got a chuckle, but even so: long walk for not much payoff.)

Which is also the case, sadly, for the third of our three very disconnected storylines: Laszlo’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Nadja’s new Antipaxan family, over in Little Antipaxos. Weirdly, it feels like both Natasia Demetriou and Matt Berry are hamstrung by these scenes: Nadja has nothing to do but fret and be annoyed, while Laszlo is stuck playing a very specific variant of dumb. It’s only when Lasz shows his true self (figuratively showing his dick? This metaphor might be escaping us) that he wins the day and some laughs: It turns out Antipaxos has a superstition about arrogant, loud-mouthed idiots who bring luck to all around them, and so he is embraced as “The King Of Pigs.” (Also, Berry gets to list off ailments that Laszlo has survived, allowing him to attack the word “fever” with typical zest.) As far as plotlines go, it’s cute—but cute doesn’t pay the comedy bills.

It feels telling that the two episodes “The Campaign” spends most of its time referencing are both from What We Do In The Shadows’ first season, because there’s a certain first-season-ness to everything that happens tonight. WWDITS took less time to find its feet than lots of TV comedies, but it still struggled at first with the perceived need to play by the rules of television—hang-ups the show has discarded, to gleeful effect, in subsequent years. “The Campaign” is a throwback to those less-confident times and a low point in an otherwise excellent season so far.

Stream the episode now: Hulu

Stray observations

• Sean (Anthony Atamaniuk) had to drop out of the comptroller race due to a draconian rule that says Staten Island candidates can’t have “more than nine DUIs. Most Staten Island officers only have two or three.”
• Kristen Schaal has literally no lines in this episode. Love her, like The Guide, but the show is kind of struggling to find things to do with her now that she’s in the main cast.
• Colin reunites with Evie at a “break up support group” where the two delight in playing out every cliché and fantasy haunting her fellow participants’ imaginations.
• “The doctor said ‘She’d be better off dead…’ And then he hung himself while I was masturbating.”
• Nadja’s been moonlighting at the Antipaxan diner, where she cheerfully serves customers salads covered in coffee stirrers, creamer, and coffee.
• Colin is happy to regale the electorate with tales of his and Evie’s two sons, Connor and…Ch-rotch-stopher?
• “Sorry I’m late, what did I miss?”
  “You actually aren’t late; you were sitting there the whole time.”
  “But I wasn’t listening, so could someone bring me up to speed?”
• Colin, after “accidentally” exposing himself to his “Colin-izers”: “Oh, it’s not what it looks like. I was just beating off to all of your beautiful faces during the break!”
• “’Who are you?’ I hear you ask. Well, it’s a good question. I am an esteemed British gentlemen, well-bred, to the manor born. I can speak fourteen languages, as long as they are English. I can play any instrument, apart from bagpipes. They sound fucking terrible, to everyone. I can fashion any tree, any hedge, into a vulva. In the days before medicine, I survived gonorrhea, chlamydia, the plague, club foot, leprosy, black fever, yellow fever, night fev-airrr. But most important—and I must emphasize that this is the most important thing about me—I am a certified master cocksman.” And that, friends, is what an episode going from a C to a C+ in the span of 60 seconds looks and sounds like.
• “I should give this back to you; I hope you didn’t pay too much for it. It gave me a rash, so I think it’s made of some really cheap metal.”
  “It’s not metal.”
  “Oh…”