‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Series Finale Draws Bloody Fun Inspiration From ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘The Office’ and Even ‘The Usual Suspects’
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from Season 6, Episode 11 of “What We Do in the Shadows,” “The Finale,” which premiered Monday, Dec. 16 on FX.
The Staten Island vampires of “What We Do in the Shadows” have closed their coffins for good.
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The final episode of Season 6 was the series finale of the FX comedy, which was originally a spinoff of the 2014 mockumentary written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. Like so many irreverent sitcoms, it ended without many lessons learned and the promise of an eternity of hijinks to come, even after the cameras are turned off.
The episode begins with Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), the human familiar of the house, lamenting that the documentary team has shot enough footage and won’t need to visit the vampires’ home anymore. While the eternal bloodsuckers — Guillermo’s master Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and The Guide (Kristen Schaal) — couldn’t care less that filming was coming to a close, Guillermo considers that it might be time for him to move on from serving Nandor and keeping the house clean for no reward. Although it doesn’t focus on it as much as the American “Office,” it’s interesting to see a mockumentary series grapple with the age-old question of “What exactly are they going to do with all of this footage?”
Amazingly, it’s revealed to Guillermo that this documentary isn’t even the first shot in the house: Cut to a clip from the unreleased 1958 series “Vampires,” apparently shot by legendary duo The Maysles Brothers, in which the vampires are having the same conversation about hygiene they had minutes earlier. Ultimately, that docuseries was shelved because, per Colin Robinson, “They said, ‘It’s just a bunch of boring people doing the same old shit day after day, nothing changes, no one ever grows, it’s pointless, yada yada.'” It’s impossible to watch that self-deprecating scene and not think of the much-maligned “Seinfeld” finale, where the gang is left locked up, having the same old argument about button placement on a shirt they had in the pilot, rotting away in a cell in sitcom hell. Ultimately, the vampires’ eternal lives will have them bickering about the same old things until the end of time.
One of the most unique elements of the episode happens when Nadja breaks the fourth wall to hypnotize the audience to help them watch the ending they find most satisfying. We then cut to an amusing, cinematically-shot parody of the end of “The Usual Suspects,” in which Schaal plays a detective and Proksch takes on “Verbal” Kint, Kevin Spacey’s character who builds a complex web of deception by making up fake names from objects around the room.
Yet the audience soon comes back to reality to spend a few more scenes with the housemates. In the end, Guillermo announces on camera that he’s going to leave the house to find himself, and Nandor allows him to call him by his name instead of “master.” Yet Guillermo goes back to see Nandor again seconds after the film crew begins to strike the set, saying he only “wanted to give the documentary an ending” and “just because we don’t work together doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”
For a tart cherry on top during the credits, the vampires and Guillermo watch the first episode of the doc. “So this is a rough cut, right? You’re open to notes?” asks Colin Robinson, as the housemates leave in boredom, with Guillermo the only one engaged with the footage. It’s self-depreciation at its finest.
In a television landscape saturated with complex storylines, life-changing character development and serialized moments, “What We Do in the Shadows” both existed and ended as a proudly silly and irreverent hang-out comedy. Jackie Daytona would certainly raise a glass in celebration.
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