‘Eternally Yours’ Review: CBS’ Anemic Vampire Sitcom

When watching TV shows or movies about vampires, it’s easy to fall into pirated shortcuts.

If something goes wrong, it sucks. If it works, that’s really good. If it’s not great but it’s missing a little something, it’s probably because it lacks issues.

Eternally yoursthe new vampire-centric sitcom from CBS, is anemic.

There are too many talented people involved on both sides of the camera for me to deny its potential. But since Eternally yours has only made its pilot available to reviewers, and since that pilot is basically no-nonsense, I can’t rely on this purely hypothetical potential (which is mostly wasted in the 21 minutes I’ve seen so far).

Honestly, I don’t even know what Eternally yours it’s going to be in series form; the pilot burns through at least three different versions of the status quo, reaching what could have been a mid-season or even season finale plot point halfway through the episode, and ending with a development that could have been saved for a finale two or three seasons later.

Pilots are designed to illustrate what a show is about and what its sense of humor will be. The pilot for Eternally yours squanders its story, feeding itself with exposition that certainly could have been doled out throughout an entire season.

While I appreciate this casting and the general premise, I would have happily traded half a dozen unsurprising “rules” and “twists” for a real comedic voice to emerge instead.

Created by Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, who managed to avoid much of that pilot awkwardness on Specters because it was based on an established British format, Eternally yours begins as the story of Charles (Ed Weeks) and Liz (Allegra Edwards).

Around 1526, he is a vampire and she is a mortal, but he loves her so much that he turns her into a vampire.

Some 500 years later, Charles and Liz are still living together, and the fatigue of half a millennium of marriage has taken its toll, but not in an interesting way. He is old-fashioned and set in his ways. Liz is a little more free-spirited. Maybe they would have divorced, but vampires can’t divorce, because if they could, there would be no plot for this series.

The “vampires can’t divorce” thing is one of at least half a dozen things we’re told about vampire rules and regulations in the pilot, none of which make sense on their own – the rhetorical equivalent of “They can’t because they can’t, now shut up.” » The rules, which are never explained, are presented as flimsy excuses for aspects of the pilot that wouldn’t otherwise hold together.

Either way, Charles and Liz are trapped in a loveless marriage. They have a daughter, Emma, ​​whom they saved from diphtheria by creating a vampire. She is a veterinarian.

They live in Seattle with Jesse (Parker Young), another vampire and personal trainer who tans because otherwise he wouldn’t show up in the mirrors at his gym – unnecessary information that raises far more questions than the show wants to answer.

Jesse is married to Phyllis (Rose Abdoo), a mortal who doesn’t know that her husband, who never ages, is a vampire. He constantly erases her memories when she discovers incriminating details, which kills brain cells. This relationship is both the closest thing the show has — because Abdoo and Young are such gifted performers — and the kind of one-sided, manipulation-driven union that gets more and more disgusting the more you think about it, so… don’t do it.

Phyllis and Jesse have twin sons: Henry (Shylo Molina) is an Edward Cullen-style brooder with a wide assortment of useful vampire powers, including super-strength, which allows him to be a young basketball star; Mort (Tristan Michael Brown) is socially awkward and his only vampire power is being able to understand the dog’s thoughts.

The idea of ​​”understanding the dog’s thoughts” isn’t a bad idea for a running joke, but nothing the pilot does with that idea is clever. Just as it must have seemed funny to someone that Edward and Liz, in a flashback, go to Sigmund Freud for marriage counseling, an already stupid idea that has a flat first draft of a punchline and could have been cut entirely without loss for the pilot. Apparently it was enough to say “He hears the dog’s thoughts” or “What if they went to couples therapy with Sigmund Freud?” » or “What if vampires just sat there and watched Dusk“No one thought to do anything new with any of the promising ideas in this pilot.

Emma also has a relationship with Max (Jaren Lewison), a Social Security office investigator who becomes increasingly frustrated that Emma won’t show him where she lives or introduce him to her family. Then, in a complete coincidence that the show doesn’t even bother to treat as anything other than a complete coincidence, Max discovers the records of someone who has been collecting Social Security since the beginning of the program, which is suspicious. This person is Jesse. Try not to be shocked. I would tell you to try not to worry about it, but there is very little chance of it happening.

The series moves from one event to the next and from one vampire ruler to the next, without establishing what its overall story will be, what the shape of its humor might be, or who any of these characters are. This is a filmed summary of the plot, which Colin Accounts And Sunny nights director Trent O’Donnell is unable to animate himself.

As things currently stand, Eternally yours boasts a talented ensemble, with no character definition to speak of, as they’re all stuck in TV sitcom business for 21 minutes. If you ask me if a series with Weeks (very funny in The Mindy Project), Edwards (very funny in Download), Lewison (very funny on I never did it), and Young and Abdoo, very funny in almost everything, could itself become a funny show, the answer is that of course it can.

So far, Eternally yours is generally “less than”. It’s less charming and cleverly constructed than Spectersless zany and inspired than What we do in the shadowsless committed to the exhausting tedium of timeless romance than that of Jim Jarmusch Only lovers remain alive.

It’s not bad, but the only things to recommend Eternally yours are hypotheses.