Natasia Demetriou – Memphis Flyer

If you want to watch some great half-hour comedy, follow the tracks of executive producer Taika Waititi. If you’re a Marvel True Believer, you know the New Zealander as the director of Thor: Ragnarok, as well as the guy under the motion capture for Korg, Thor’s alien drinking buddy. But as an executive producer, he’s been quietly amassing a Norman Lear-sized string of great television.

Waititi got his start in TV as part of the team that made Flight of the Conchords, a standout of the ’00s comedy boomlet. The musical world, where characters can go off into a visual flight of fancy while singing a song, has subtly influenced everything he’s done since. So has the humor, which invites the audience to laugh at its characters’ absurdities and vanity, but never puts anyone down.

In 2014, Waititi teamed up with Conchords Jemaine Clement to write, direct, and co-star in What We Do in the Shadows. The film took the mockumentary framework of Man Bites Dog and The Office and applied it to a dysfunctional group of vampires living as flatmates in Wellington. The film gleefully skewered horror tropes, and like Conchords, was elevated by great characters and keen observation which finds the humor in everyday conflicts and setbacks.

In 2018, Waititi and Clement drummed up a television spin-off for Shadows that went in an unexpected direction. Instead of following the vampires, they focused on the two police officers who kept getting called to investigate disturbances in the vampires’ home. It turns out that the vamps aren’t the only weird things Officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary) see on a daily basis. Wellington Paranormal deftly mixes Cops and The X-Files. Sgt. Maaka (Maaka Pohatu) serves as a low-rent version of A.D. Skinner, sending the Mulder and Scully figures out to investigate supernatural phenomena like a haunted Nissan 300ZX, alien body-snatcher replicator pod farms, and the constant menace of zombie outbreak.

Wellington Paranormal was a hit in New Zealand and was only recently released in the U.S., but its success spawned a full-fledged Shadows TV adaptation, transported from New Zealand to Staten Island. Waititi helped launch the show’s first season, directing three episodes including the pilot and “The Trial,” an instant classic where the ensemble cast of Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin (Mark Proksch) are judged unworthy by a council of vampires consisting of high-powered cameos from actors like Tilda Swinton and Wesley Snipes. Waititi stepped away from the show after the first season, but it has only gotten better. Now in its third season, it has fleshed out the character of Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), added the great Kristen Schaal as a series regular, and finally acquired the budget to match its story ambitions.

Waititi’s latest TV venture is also set in the United States, but not in a place that usually inspires comedies. Reservation Dogs follows four teenage friends growing up on a Native-American reservation in Oklahoma. Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is the reluctant leader of the group, who starts off the pilot episode by stealing a potato chip delivery truck and selling it to a chop shop run by meth heads. Elora (Devery Jacobs), Cheese (Lane Factor), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) are saving the ill-gotten gains from their petty crimes to leave the reservation for the promised land of California. The series was developed with Sterlin Harjo, a longtime indie filmmaker who mined his childhood as a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma for stories and settings. It’s definitely a comedy but not a laugh-out-loud kinda show — the second episode revolves around the difficulty of accessing healthcare on the reservation, for example. As Bear and his buds get into low-stakes scrapes, which feel very high-stakes to them, the ensemble expands as they encounter one memorable character after another. Harjo’s voice is dominant, but you can see Waititi’s influences in the magical realist touches, such as the spirit of a less-than-heroic warrior ancestor who haunts Bear, dispensing advice of dubious value.

The show is shaping up to be the best example of the humane, inclusive humor, which is Waititi’s much-needed contribution to our shell-shocked culture.

One of the most quietly influential films of the last 30 years is Man Bites Dog. The 1992 film was created by three Belgians: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and actor Benoît Poelvoorde. The trio took the mockumentary sub-genre — which takes the tropes used by news broadcasts and documentary filmmakers and twists them to comedic ends — in a strange and disturbing new direction. Poelvoorde played a serial killer named Ben, who invites a film crew along to document his “art.” Belvaux and Bonzel play the director and cameraman who, at first, believe they are participating in a radical new form of cinema. But as Ben’s body count mounts — and includes their sound man — the filmmakers find themselves drawn deeper and deeper into Ben’s crimes.

Man Bites Dog is wickedly funny, but it was little seen in America thanks to an inexplicable NC-17 rating. But its spirit was definitely present in The Office, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s millennial BBC TV series which inspired the American mega-hit starring Steve Carell. Now, a deadpan protagonist talking to the camera about his bad behavior has become a familiar trope in TV and movies.

Dark shadows: Berry, Demetriou, and Novak suck at being roommates

Flight of the Concords‘ Jemaine Clement and New Zealand super-director Taika Waititi’s 2014 film What We Do in the Shadows owed a huge debt to Man Bites Dog, only instead of the mundane life of a serial killer, it “documented” a group of vampires living together as flatmates in a sleepy Wellington suburb. The film took the same slapstick attitude toward murder that made Man Bites Dog so shocking, but sanded off its arch edges by making the vamps, played by Clement and Waititi, kinda goofy in that charming New Zealand-y way.

The movie was funny, but not huge, box-office wise. But it did make the perfect setup for a post-Office sitcom. With Waititi off making projects like Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit, and a new Star Wars project, Clement took the Shadows concept to TV in 2019, moving the setting to Staten Island and introducing a new cast of bloodsuckers.

Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) is a 700-year-old vampire who was once the bloodthirsty king of a minor empire, kinda like Vlad the Impaler. Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) was once a Roma fortune teller who vampirized Laszlo Cravensworth (Matt Berry), a pompous English nobleman, then married him. Those three characters are all familiar vampire types right out of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. But the show’s secret weapon is Mark Proksch. His Colin Robinson, who wouldn’t be out of place in The Office, is an “energy vampire.” Instead of blood, he drains his victims of the will to live by telling long, boring stories. Since all self-respecting vampire stories require a Renfield, Nandor has Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) in his thrall as a familiar.

The core cast hit the ground running in season one as an already tight unit with easily relatable roomie relationships. They’re friends who chafe against the strictures of communal living. None of the centuries-old friends have really adapted well to the modern world, particularly the difficulty of acquiring virgins, who are particularly tasty treats for vampires. They mostly offload that responsibility on the put-upon Guillermo, who desperately wants to become a vampire himself.

Mark Proksch, Natasia Demetriou, Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, and Harvey Guillén

The highlight of season one was the climax, where the roomies are brought before a council of vampires to be judged for their crimes to vampiric kind. Not only did Clement and Waititi reprise their roles for the show, but they worked their showbiz connections to assemble an all-star cast of people who have played vampires in the past, from Tilda Swinton (Only Lovers Left Alive) to Wesley Snipes (Blade).

The second season, currently airing on FX, has been perfect from the get-go. Guillermo is dealing with the revelation that he is a descendant of Dracula’s nemesis Van Helsing. His identity crisis comes to a head when he stumbles into a group of would-be vampire slayers, bringing Buffy into the parody mix. The vamps branch out into the neighborhood by attending what they believe to be an owl-themed party that turns out to be a Super Bowl gathering of dreary suburbanites.

Colin gets the best episode of the season so far when he is promoted to boss at his office job and proceeds to become extraordinarily powerful by sucking the energy out of his hapless underlings. The big-time cameos continue with an absolutely killer turn by Mark Hamill as Vampire Jim, an enemy from Laszlo’s past who forces our hero vamp to assume an alternate identity as Jackie Daytona, a bartender obsessed with women’s volleyball.

The combination of gothic, slapstick, and deadpan makes for fertile comedy ground, and Clement and company show no sign of exhausting it any time soon. The scripts are sharp, the visual effects are used sparingly but effectively, and the cast is one of the best on television. The quirky, modest What We Do in the Shadows has become destination TV.

What We Do in the Shadows airs on Wednesdays on FX.