southdavid

I've written a review for each season of "What We Do In The Shadows" that you can find against the final epsiodes of the run, if you're so inclined. Now the series is over, however, I felt I should put something here to sum up my overall feelings about the show.

Three vampires Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) live in present day Staten Island with Guillermo (Harvey Gullen), Nandor's human familiar and Colin (Mark Proksch) an emotional vampire, who lives on the energy he can draw from people. Comfortable in their modern surroundings, the arrival of "The Baron" an old vampire who believes in the subjugation of humans threatens to disrupt their lives.

Despite being produced in the States, and written primarily by two New Zealanders, "WWDITS" feels very British in its sensibilities. The absurdities of the situation, the deadpan delivery style and language reflect the three English stars and some of the wider writing staff. The documentary style isn't new, but I feel like we've had a few years away from it, since the ends of "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation" so it doesn't feel as overfamiliar here as it could have done. The effects are pretty good, be it the CGI transitions into bats or the prosthetics work of The Baron. . The cameo's range from solid turns from regular comedic actors, like Kristen Schaal or Nick Kroll up to the seventh episode which is an extraordinary cavalcade of virtually every star whose ever played a Vampire reappearing to form the Vampire council.

I think the show consistently improves over the first five seasons and realises that diminishing returns are likely to set in after the sixth so wisely goes out whilst still good.

After a shaky first few episodes "What we Do In The Shadows" has been one of the best sitcoms of recent times. This sixth season, whilst still good, perhaps shows that it's time for the series to end before it's forced into repeating itself.

Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) leaves Nandor's (Kayvan Novak) service and goes to work at Cannon Capital Strategies, a finance company led by Jordan (Tim Heidecker) who has similar traits to Nandor. Both Nandor and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) join the company at similar times, though keep their connections to Guillermo and each other secret. Laszlo (Matt Berry) taking no inspiration from any gothic novels, resurrects a man made of various dead humans sewn together. He quickly tires of his monster though with Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) picking up the slack.

Again, generally I thought this season was good. I enjoyed the cameos particularly from Steve Coogan as Laszlo's long dead father Roderick and from Kevin Pollack as the star of a long running cop show that ends up filming in the area.

I wasn't wild about either the office or the Frankenstein storylines though. Nurturing Laszlo does appear to be a recurrence of a previous plot and office politics has been done in a number of shows. They were fine, but it's well covered ground. It still made me laugh regularly, all of that cast can just make me chuckle on line delivery alone so it's still somewhat said to see the show end, even if I can see that it's probably the right time.

When I started the series, I couldn't have hoped that it was going to end up being as good as it was and I'm sad to see it end, but excited for whatever the cast decide to do next.

I have reviewed each episode of "Love, Death + Robots" and am a big video games guy, so thought I'd do the same process for Amazon's "Secret Level".

This is another game that I've no experience of playing at all. Descriptions of the game make it sounds quite a bit like "Fallout" particularly the cypher character. Like the recent adaptation of "Fallout" they make the choice here to tell a story in the world, rather than the story of the game.

An orphan on a dead-end planet, Amos' (Brenock O'Connor) only happiness came from interactions with Felicity (Raffey Cassidy) a young Doctor who has subsequently managed to get off world. When he learns that she is working for the megacorporation Auntie Cleo, he volunteers to join them as a test subject. He willingly, nay cheerfully, allows them to conduct experiments on him on the hope that he will see Felicity again.

Again, visually this is amazing, I initially thought it was live action, so impressive and realistic was the movement, but you do come to see that it is animated and there are some exaggerations to appearances, particularly in older characters. I did though recognise actress Fenella Woolgar from here characters appearance, and not from her voice.

I thought the plot was OK. It's a fun little story of love and disappointment and one that ends on a kicker rather than a revelation. There are amusing moments as Auntie Cleo's crazy experiments fail and Amos loses more and more of himself to biomechanical replacements.

I'm not sure it particularly makes me want to try out the game, but I enjoyed this whilst it was on and feel that there's more scope for stories in this world.