Change is difficult for all the characters (living and undead) in What We Do in the Shadows, if not, thankfully, for the series itself, which remains as sharp and witty as ever in its fourth season (July 12). Even as it charts new ground, FX’s hit continues to be TV’s most absurdly entertaining half-hour comedy, thanks to protagonists who are still searching for fulfillment and purpose in all the wrong places—or, at least, are mutating in novel ways, as is the case with Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), the energy vampire who perished at the conclusion of Season 3 and has now been reborn as a small CGI-ified boy in striped pajamas whose nightmarish weirdness is part of what makes him so eye-openingly hilarious.
The question looming over the early part of What We Do in the Shadows is whether this adolescent creature is the same droning, vitality-draining Colin Robinson whose dead torso it clawed out of at the end of last year. Certainly, he has the face of his former self, although Laszlo (Matt Berry) is convinced it’s a discrete life form and thus chooses to refer to it by a new name (the fact that he opts for Boy as the tyke’s moniker is part and parcel of Laszlo’s own idiocy). Persuasive evidence of this nü-Colin Robinson’s distinctive personality comes from the discovery that the kid doesn’t gravitate toward mind-numbing material in the manner that his predecessor did; on the contrary, the strange little freak, whom Proksch imagines as a hyperactive kid with a high-pitched voice and an excitable demeanor, mostly has a hunger for home-remodeling television, Marvel and Star Wars Lego sets, and musical theater.
It’s the last of these that proves to be the most unexpected—and amusing—turn of events in the initial four episodes provided to press, and it speaks to What We Do in the Shadows’ enduring ability to surprise through random narrative twists and revelations about its characters’ centuries-earlier and/or recent pasts. Everyone is in a state of transition as the fourth season picks up, with Laszlo playing babysitter to pint-sized Colin Robinson (and letting their Staten Island manor fall into disrepair), and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Nandor (Kayvan Novak) returning from their year-long overseas sojourns. For the vampiress, her brief stint on England’s Supreme Vampiric Council was less than fulfilling, filled with dreary committee meetings that were almost as boring as her bald-headed flatmate. Nandor, meanwhile, found his journey to his ancestral homeland stymied by travel mix-ups that left him paired with a touristy Wisconsin family, and let him get only as far as Fresno.
