Can What We Do In The Shadows Work As A TV Show?

The 2014 mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows is a bit of a favourite with Cultured Vultures, placing on our list of top ten comedy-horrors – so it was excellent Halloweeny news to learn that director Taika Waititi recently suggested a TV adaptation was on the cards in an interview with Fandango, saying ‘We’re trying to develop a U.S. version of What We Do In The Shadows. You know, set here in the states, but a TV show.’

What We Do In The Shadows was a revealing glimpse into the everyday lives of a group of vampires living in Wellington, New Zealand. Critics described it as ‘the Spinal Tap of vampire movies’, a comparison that holds up – not just because of the fly-on-the-wall filming style, but because of the look behind the scenes of a group of glamorous decadents, a look under their skin if you will. A lot of comedy claims to strike at universal human truths, but some of the best doesn’t feel the need to limit that idea to the strictly human.

Part of the appeal here – and a big part of the similarities between What We Do In The Shadows and the Tap – is the audience’s desire to see the great and good knocked down a peg, to see their bubble punctured just a little. Vampires aren’t a million miles from rock stars at any rate – there’s the flamboyant style, the insatiable craving for attention, and, of course, the sex appeal. Even before Bram Stoker’s Dracula vampires were getting sexified, and eventually Anne Rice just came right out and made them actual rock stars (then Stephenie Meyer made them Justin Bieber, but let’s not dwell on that).

Now, the big question is how well would the formula translate to television. There likely wouldn’t be too many practical difficulties – the documentary format is by nature less labour- and cash-intensive than filming more conventional narratives, and the original kept the vampire-y special effects, if not to a minimum, then carefully underplayed. The film’s cast, boasting Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords fame and Waititi himself turning in a wonderfully earnest peformance, were a fine ensemble. Obviously the dream would be for them to transfer along with the property, but even if not, the characters were robust enough that it shouldn’t be too much of a struggle to cast suitable replacements.

The unpolished nature of the documentary format has tended to lend itself well to comedy – as you might have guessed from the existence of the term ‘mockumentary’ – and there are many fine examples of the idea working just as well on the small screen as in the cinema. The Office was both so renowned and so solid a format that the American version worked as well, Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick Of It used a wobbly-cammed documentary style, and to bring up Spinal Tap again, that particular classic had a spiritual predecessor in two episodes of The Comic Strip Presents, ‘Bad News’ and ‘More Bad News’, which featured The Young Ones veterans Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, and Nigel Planer as members of a particularly tragic rock outfit.

There’s also a comparison to be made with the BBC series Being Human, which while conventionally shot centred on a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost who shared a house. Less comedic than that description might sound, it nonetheless went down well, with Aidan Turner – who played the vampire – proving enough of a brooding breakout star that they turned him loose in big-budget historo-drama Poldark.

If this announcement comes as welcome news to you – and I assume you wouldn’t have read this far if it didn’t – you’ll be pleased to hear that the TV adaptation won’t be the only addition to the What We Do In The Shadows franchise. Waititi has also spoken publicly about a planned sequel, We’re Wolves, presumably following the Wellington werewolves who served as frenemies to the vampires in the first film. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also talk of another TV spinoff, this one following the two hapless New Zealand police officers who showed up in the latter part of the film and completely failed to do anything about Wellington’s vampire problem.

With fully three related projects in the works, there is always the danger that Waititi is overreaching following his first mainstream success. Granted it isn’t as if he’ll be personally overseeing every aspect of all three projects down to costume and lighting – but then that is in and of itself a potential risk. When I made that crack about The Office being an adaptation that worked, that wasn’t because that’s a common occurrence. For every success story like that there’s a dozen that infuriated the fanbase and were then brushed into the waste paper basket of history. Still, this isn’t to end on a sour note. Thus far, this is just idle speculation – on the one hand this and on the other hand that, and so on – and nobody would be more happy than me to be proven wrong about these nagging doubts.