With the untimely demise of What We Do in the Shadows, there is clearly room on everyone’s television-watching schedule for a new vampire comedy. I’m not saying this in-the-works series will push the same buttons, but I am saying… there’s something delicious here. As Deadline succinctly explains, “Paul Wesley, an actor who played a vampire on The Vampire Diaries, is executive producing a series project about a vampire who wants to be an actor.”
One certainly wishes that Paul Wesley, an actor who also plays Captain Kirk on Strange New Worlds (pictured above), could somehow also appear in this vampire series, but that possibility is not discussed in Deadline’s post. It does elaborate somewhat on the plot, which features a “25-year-old vampire” (okay but wait, has he been a vampire for 25 years or was he turned at 25?) who would rather become an actor than handle the family business under the watchful eyeteeth of his “murderous and suffocating vampire parents.”
This series does not yet have a title, but is written by Victor Fresco (Santa Clarita Diet) and has The Rookie’s Liz Friedlander as director. Both writer and director will also executive produce alongside Wesley, Aaron Kaplan, and Tracy Katsky. What this actually means in terms of Wesley’s involvement is vague, but said involvement is clearly enough to make some people take notice.
All of these folks have worked together before—Friedlander, for example, directed an episode of The Vampire Diaries—and the series concept “came from Friedlander, Wesley and Kaplan who shared it with Fresco.” It’s in development at Fox, so we’ll just have to wait and see if it has (undead) legs.
