Forty seconds into the “Eternally Yours” trailer, a young woman sits her boyfriend down to explain why he has never been allowed inside her house. She braces. He promises he will understand. And then she says, “The truth is, we’re Canadian,” while the television behind her shows a moose standing in a mountain valley. It is a very good joke, it is deployed early, and it tells you exactly what CBS has bought here: a vampire show that is much more interested in being a sitcom than in being about vampires.
The new series lands Thursday, October 8, and it comes from Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, who run “Ghosts,” which is currently the most reliable comedy on the network. The premise is the kind of thing that sounds like a one-line pitch and then keeps opening out. Charles (Ed Weeks) and Liz (Allegra Edwards) are a vampire couple who have been married for five hundred years, they live in present day Seattle with a coven of housemates, and the romance has gone completely flat. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Eternally Yours” trailer, including the reveal it spends its first minute building toward.
And then she says, “The truth is, we’re Canadian,” while the television behind her shows a moose standing in a mountain valley.”
The reveal itself is staged like a horror beat and then punctured. Emma (Helen J. Shen) walks her boyfriend Max (Jaren Lewison) up to a large brick house at night. There is a figure waiting in the lit doorway. Max turns to a heavy wooden door, a hand reaches for him, and then Charles and Liz come at the camera together with their fangs out and their fingers hooked, snarling like something off a Universal poster. Cut. They are standing in a hallway in ordinary clothes. “Hi,” says one. “Hey,” says the other. Emma, exasperated, gestures at the pair of them: “These are my parents. We’re not Canadian.”
Max takes it about as well as anyone would, which is to say he starts negotiating. He explains, at speed, that he has just learned vampires are real and that he is dating one, and then asks whether somebody could please unbolt the door with their mind. Emma rounds on her family for wrecking the first relationship she has had in a while. And somebody in the coven, entirely unbothered, delivers the trailer’s best throwaway: “Well, life is tough, and then you continue to not die.”
That line is the whole show in one sentence, and it is the same trick “Ghosts” runs. Take a supernatural condition everybody already understands, then treat it as a domestic inconvenience rather than a source of menace. The coven have lived together for centuries, which the trailer establishes with a shot of one of them raising a glass “to my boys leading the Wildcats to victory” and another muttering that they play games while the world is at war. Nobody is stalking anybody. They are irritating each other in a nice house.
The marriage is where the trailer spends its real money, and it does it with period flashbacks rather than dialogue. Liz and Charles appear on a stone balcony under a painted storm sky in Renaissance dress, young and delighted with each other, and she tells him they can be together forever. Later they turn up again in Victorian clothes, sitting bolt upright on a chaise in a cluttered drawing room, no longer touching. Then present day: the two of them in bed, her scrolling a phone, him reading a book, a foot of mattress between them. Three shots, five hundred years, and not a word of exposition.
The dialogue that goes over it is sharp in the way long-married people are sharp with each other. Liz tells her daughter, carefully, “I do not regret marrying your father. I just wish things were more like how they used to be.” Charles clears his throat and she rounds on him for it, and he says he was not aware he did that, and then the trailer flips it: back in the Renaissance she is telling him, adoringly, “Charles, I want to wake up to that throat clear till the end of time.” That is a good gag and a slightly sad one, which is a difficult combination to land in a network comedy.
The trap is explicit. “This marriage is literally never ending,” one of them says. “Can’t even get a divorce.” Vampires are not allowed to, apparently, and the Council of Elders would chop the pair of them into a thousand pieces for trying. A housemate offers the alternative approach: “This is why I only marry humans. You have fun till they croak and then you get a new model.” Asked how that is working out, he concedes that people are living a little longer than they used to. It is a divorce comedy that cannot have a divorce, which is a genuinely clever engine for a sitcom.
The rest is the small stuff, and the small stuff is where this kind of show either works or dies. A teenager shrieking “Why does Charles have fangs?” and then, catching up, “Are you all vampires? Is that why none of you age?” A parent calling “Oh, hey guys, how was school?” to kids walking in mid crisis. Somebody asking, flatly, “Remind me why we have the mirror.” And a doorstep exchange where Liz tells Max she needs to be formally invited in, he says “Oh, that’s really a thing,” promises not to offer her any garlic, and gets told that garlic is a very offensive stereotype.
It closes on the best idea in the whole thing. The entire coven is crammed onto and around one sofa watching “Twilight,” and they are heckling it like a football match. “I didn’t want to watch that stupid Twilight movie, but they really nailed it.” Then, as Bella makes her choice: “Don’t do it.” “Huge mistake, Bella.” “Get out of there, Edward.” “Go for the werewolf.” “Run as fast as you can.” A room full of people who actually did choose forever, watching a teenager decide to, and screaming at the screen. If the series is as sure of its own joke as that scene is, CBS has something.
What Do You Think? Is a marriage that literally cannot end a strong enough engine to run for seasons, or does it become the same joke every week? Does the “Ghosts” formula transfer, or is the whole reason that show works the fact its ghosts are strangers thrown together rather than a couple who chose each other? And is putting the best gag forty seconds into the trailer confidence, or is it a sign the rest of the pilot needed the help?
See you on the next binge!
