The Pitch: Lonely, unfulfilled, and too insecure to tell his cute Slushie Shack co-worker, Sarah (Em Haine) that he’s into her, Reginald Andres (Jacob Batalon) is coasting through his twenties terminally disappointed with where his life has taken him.
But while taking out the Slushie Shack trash at the end of one particularly long shift, Reginald stumbles into a hypnotic new friendship with a smooth operator named Maurice (Mandela Van Peebles), and everything changes. Overnight, and at the most inconvenient moment imaginable, Reginald finds he’s been turned into a member of the undead.
This proves to be problematic for more reasons than just can’t go out in the sun, have to drink blood to survive — in Reginald the Vampire’s world, creatures of the night are vain, status-obsessed perfectionists who maintain their supermodel standards through a particularly vicious balance of bureaucracy and backstabbing.
Which is to say, Reginald just trying to live his un-life as a chill, fat vampire with a maybe-girlfriend he might (one day, if he plays his cards right!) also get to kiss, is seen as a full-on affront against vampiric nature. And with Maurice already vampira non grata in the local scene for mysterious reasons of his own, Reginald’s chances of surviving to see his first deathday are, well, not great.
A note: The word “fat” is used regularly and deliberately throughout this series, both in its most neutral (Reginald) and most derogatory (the vampire community) terms. Accordingly, the term is used throughout this review both ways, written in plain text when it’s a neutral descriptor, and in “quotes” when it’s reflecting the vampires’ bigotry.
A Novel Approach: One of four (yes! four!) TV adaptations of very different but very beloved vampire novels to be hitting the small screen this October, Reginald the Vampire takes its inspiration from Johnny B. Truant’s rompy Fat Vampire books. Set in Akron, Ohio (hot) and featuring both a smorgasbord of human awkwardness, vampy camp, and unrestrained slushie-based comedy, and a palette of oversaturated, corporatized primary colors, Reginald the Vampire is easily the least serious of the bunch. It is also exactly the show it wants to be.
Reginald the Vampire (Syfy)