'What We Do In The Shadows' Spin-Off 'Wellington Paranormal' Gets An Extended Trailer

While you wait for the third season of What We Do in the Shadows to hit FX, there are other corners of the same universe to explore, and not all of them involve vampires. It's been over three years since Wellington Paranormal started broadcasting in New Zealand, but now it's finally making its way to the shores of the U.S. The series is a more direct spin-off of the original 2014 film version of What We Do in the Shadows. It debuted on The CW on July 11, with new episodes streaming on HBO Max the day after they air on television. Now, the network has released an extended trailer showing what fans can expect from the rest of this season.

Wellington Paranormal stars Mike Minogue and Karen O'Leary as, well, Officers Minogue and O'Leary. They're the two cops who showed up at the vampires' flat in the What We Do in the Shadows movie. If you remember, Viago (Taika Waititi) used his powers of hypnosis to keep them from seeing anything unusual inside the house. Apparently, that was just one stop in the nightly adventures of the Wellington Police Paranormal Unit, whose regular duties entail investigating crop circles and crab-walking, demon-possessed girls, along with hubcaps that look like UFOs and your garden-variety ghosts and werewolves.

"We're kind of like Mulder and Scully," Officer Minogue explains in the trailer. "We've got sort of an underlying sexual tension going on." (This is news to Officer O'Leary.)

The series offers a supernatural mockumentary riff on reality shows like Cops and Live PD (both of which were canceled stateside last year in the wake of the George Floyd protests). Series co-creator Jemaine Clement directs numerous episodes and you might even hear or see him and fellow Flight of the Conchords alum Rhys Darby as guest stars. Remember: werewolves, not swearwolves.

The trailer also offers a brief glimpse of Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), the loose-lipped fourth Musketeer who went around announcing he was a vampire while enjoying Wellington's nightlife in the What We Do in the Shadows film. He's back for one episode.

Clement, Waititi, and Jonathan Brugh cameoed as members of the Vampire Council in the first season of What We Do in the Shadows, but the FX show effectively remixed their story for American TV audiences. With future What We Do in the Shadows spin-offs on hold, Wellington Paranormal is currently your best bet for experiencing the same supernatural brand of Kiwi cringe comedy.