‘Eternally Yours’ Review: CBS’ Anemic Vampire Sitcom

When reviewing TV shows or movies about vampires, it’s easy to fall into hacky shorthand.

If something is bad, it sucks. If it works, it’s bloody good. If it isn’t awful but it’s missing a certain something, it probably lacks stakes.

Eternally Yours, CBS’ new vampire-centric sitcom, 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 critics, and since that pilot is basically laugh-free, I can’t rely on that purely hypothetical potential (which is generally squandered in the 21 minutes I’ve seen so far).

Honestly, I’m not even sure what Eternally Yours is going to be as a series; the pilot burns through at least three different versions of the status quo, hitting what could have been a midseason or even season finale plot point midway through the episode, and closing with a development that could have been held for a finale two or three seasons down the road.

Pilots are designed to illustrate what a show is going to be about and what its sense of humor is going to be. The pilot for Eternally Yours wastes its story, larding up on exposition that definitely could have been distributed throughout an entire season.

As much as I enjoy this cast and the general premise, I would gladly have traded a half-dozen “rules” and unsurprising “twists” for an actual comic voice to emerge instead.

Created by Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, who were able to avoid a lot of this pilot clunkiness on Ghosts because it was based on an established British format, Eternally Yours starts off as the story of Charles (Ed Weeks) and Liz (Allegra Edwards).

Circa 1526, he’s a vampire and she’s 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 a half-millennium of marriage has taken its toll, but not in an interesting way. He’s old-fashioned and set in his ways. Liz is a little bit more free-spirited. Perhaps they would have gotten a divorce, but vampires can’t get divorced, because if they could there wouldn’t be a plot for this show.

The “vampires can’t get divorced” thing is one of at least a half-dozen things we’re told about vampire rules and regulations in the pilot, none of which make any inherent sense — the rhetorical equivalent of “They can’t because they can’t, now shut up.” The rules, which are never explained, are put there as flimsy excuses for aspects of the pilot that don’t hold together otherwise.

Anyway, Charles and Liz are trapped in a loveless marriage. They have a daughter, Emma, whom they saved from diphtheria by making a vampire. She’s a veterinarian.

They’re living in Seattle with Jesse (Parker Young), a fellow vampire and personal trainer who spray-tans because otherwise he wouldn’t appear in the mirrors at his gym — a needless tidbit that raises far more questions than the show is interested in answering.

Jesse is married to Phyllis (Rose Abdoo), a mortal woman who doesn’t know that her never-aging husband is a vampire. He’s constantly wiping her memories when she finds out incriminating details, which kills brain cells. This relationship is simultaneously the closest the show comes to funny — because Abdoo and Young are very gifted performers — and the kind of one-sided, manipulation-driven union that becomes ickier and ickier the more you think about it, so…don’t.

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

The “understanding the dog’s thoughts” thing isn’t a bad idea for a running joke, but nothing the pilot does with the idea is clever. Just like it must have seemed funny to somebody to have Edward and Liz, in a flashback, go to Sigmund Freud for marriage counseling, an already dumb idea that has a flat, first-draft punchline and could have been cut entirely with no loss to the pilot. It was apparently enough to say “He can hear the dog’s thoughts” or “What if they went to couples therapy with Sigmund Freud?” or “What if the vampires sat around watching Twilight?” Nobody thought to do anything fresh with a single one of the promising ideas in this pilot.

Emma is also having a relationship with Max (Jaren Lewison), an investigator for the social security office who’s 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 treating like anything other than a complete coincidence, Max discovers the records for a person who has been collecting social security since the program began, which is suspicious. That person is Jesse. Try not to be shocked. I’d tell you to try not to care, but there’s very little risk of that occurring.

The show caroms around from one event to the next, and from one vampire rule to the next, without establishing what its overall story is going to be, what the shape of its humor might be or who any of these characters are. It’s a filmed plot summary, one that Colin From Accounts and Sunny Nights director Trent O’Donnell is unable to liven up.

As it stands, Eternally Yours boasts a talented ensemble, without any character definition to speak of because they’re all stuck doing TV sitcom business for 21 minutes. If you ask me if a show starring Weeks (very funny in The Mindy Project), Edwards (very funny in Upload), Lewison (very funny on Never Have I Ever), and Young and Abdoo, very funny in almost everything, could itself become a funny show, the answer is that of course it could.

So far, Eternally Yours is mostly “less-than.” It’s less charming and cleverly constructed than Ghosts, less zany and inspired than What We Do in the Shadows, less committed to the draining ennui of timeless romance than Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.

It doesn’t suck, but the only things to recommend Eternally Yours are hypotheticals.