by Kay Curry
Northwest Asia Weekly
Courtesy: SYFY and San Diego Comic-Con.
Reginald the Vampire, which aired on SYFY on October 5, didn’t live up to its intent. Unfortunately, the titular protagonist Jacob Batalon (Spider-Man’s sidekick) didn’t perform convincingly. Possibly the writing and directing are to blame, as Batalon himself is charismatic. For him, the opportunity is influential. “Being the leader of something is more of a dream for me. Being a vampire is adding toppings to the delicious ice cream I have…that’s a really fun part and I’m so glad I did, ‘” Batalon said in a news interview.
According to Johnny B. Truant’s “Fat Vampire” book, “Reginald” lacks comedic timing and meaning. Watching the first five episodes, I wasted five hours of my life with no vampires around to give them back (this is not an invitation, you vampires!). Who is the audience? I’m not sure. Em Haine, who plays Reginald’s lover, commented that SYFY’s audience was generous. I can see how funny teen humor is, but the gore is so over the top that it probably isn’t for kids. Not that gore is “real.” Just crazy for no reason. There’s bloody sex orgies, vampires drinking each other’s blood (is this a new one–nutritious or just perverted?), Reggie is starving because he’s too incompetent to kill it, which is sweet, but… …he drank it from the jar or poured it over his ice cream. Total.
Courtesy: SYFY and San Diego Comic-Con.
“It’s a tried and true classic genre…but our take on it is so different and unique, it’s absolutely ridiculous at times, you can’t help but laugh and have fun, but it also does have its own unique world… What our vampires can do and what they can’t, it builds its own universe in that sense,” Aaron Buchholz, who plays Reginald’s supervisor and torturer, explained to the outlet.
Indeed, the show has its own genre approach. Sadly, it comes up on TV with the same problem that some readers think books have: “inconsistent tone.” I can handle blood, but it doesn’t make any sense for the rest of the show.
Reggie works on “Slushy Shack,” a candy-colored place where “slushies” look like alien slime, and Reggie’s “father” Morris was supposed to be “cool” (Mandela van Peeble s) like to go. Really? None of this fits the show’s dark side and bad guy vampires.
One moment you’re hanging out at an after-school special, the next a vampire is ripping off someone’s head. It’s not a pleasant juxtaposition. It’s not “Oh, there’s a dark underworld in our everyday life.” These are two different stories.
In the book, Reggie doesn’t work at Slushy Shack. How he “turns around” is also different. On the show, almost everyone bullied him relentlessly about his weight. This is one of the main agendas of the show.
“Comedies are born out of pain. Things are funniest when they reveal the hard realities we all share,” says Margaret Hannah, who plays Reginald’s binary colleague. I agree with her, but it has to be based on, yes, reality. I admit I haven’t been anywhere and I haven’t done everything, but I’ve never seen so many adults in my life shaming anyone.
Who did this? Maybe frat boys. Almost everyone at Slushy Shack gets fired for being harassed in today’s workplace.
The constant fat shaming on the show feels like…fat shaming…instead of trying to fight it. The show failed to live up to the level of intent of its cast.
“My favorite part of the show is [the] …the visceral themes we encountered,” Hayne told the outlet. “This show is a message … about being inclusive and finding yourself and really questioning what it means to belong and what it means for me Where does it belong? “
The thing is, on the show, Reggie is fat, but not great. They present a compensation rather than total self-love. What else can you do, Reggie? You have a big brain! How about “love the whole me”? I mean, he does need to grow up. He could learn some table manners, be more confident, and stop working at Slushy Shack just because he likes a girl.
“When you can’t love yourself, there are real consequences, and those consequences not only affect you, but the people you care about most,” Hannah explained, the most successful subject.
The time to be a vampire was the wrong time for Reginald, but it was also the right time, as it provided the boost he needed to get out of the shell. But I am not envious at all. Batalon tries to be funny, or the script does, but the delivery is weird, with a pause before everything he does and says. The show needs to get up to speed. One hour per episode is torture. Something funny and timely happens every now and then, ie. Reggie and Morris meet a vampire they think is “dead”: “Are you alive?” “Technically, no one is alive here.” Bah.
The “rules” of vampires don’t make sense. Vampires are super snobs and will avoid rejecting anyone who doesn’t meet their requirements for appearance and health. You can’t change anything about yourself once you turn around, so Reggie is “destined” to be overweight forever. However, he still has to be “trained” to do some sort of vampire “test” (they have the whole bureaucracy). What is he training for? He can’t gain muscle. He can’t lose weight. Can he hurry up? do not understand.
As for representation, there’s Filipino-American Batalon, “Mike” played by Ryan Jinn, and Asian femme fatale Harley Quinn-esque stun killer “Nikki”, played by Christin Park. I seem to be a little uncomfortable with Mike’s main purpose as a seductive. He was blatantly objectified. I thought, “Have we arrived? We’ve gone from not having a decent Asian actor role to a dazzling one?” Nikki turns out to have an appealing soft side, which comes out unexpectedly in episode five. This is the only subplot in the series that I like.
The actors, who are immeasurably the funnier, had big dreams for “Reginald,” and it’s a shame the show didn’t live up to them. “We use the analogy of a vampire…[are like] American society today,” Batalon told The Weekly. “We paint them as these beautiful Hollywood-standard-looking people, but not that deep.have me…he doesn’t look like a hollywood heroine type who is a thoughtful person…mysterious and omnipresent, I think it’s important to know…it’s not just a thing [being] vampire. “If we needed to know that. I’m not sure we did! Still, I’m happy for Batalon in this non-standard role, and I hope it continues, for all the atypical Hollywood or vampire types.
Kay can reach info@nwasianweekly.com.
