The 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows has followed the example set by its subjects, and arisen from the great beyond of film to find a new final resting place on TV. The feature-to-series adaptation makes for a less grisly conversion than the transmogrifications of the undead, too; the film’s cultural points of reference were rooted in the small screen, and turning over a story about bickering roommates to the medium that gave us The Real World feels like a fulfillment of dark destiny.

After five years and one extremely high-profile directing gig for the Marvel-industrial complex, Taika Waititi has the industry clout to remount his crowning achievement. The cult film conducted a hilariously unholy blood wedding between the particulars of vampire lore – the ability to turn into a bat, the predilection for virgin victims – and the banality of cohabitation with people prone to getting on your nerves. Waititi and fellow New Zealander Jemaine Clement share creator credit on this new series just as they co-wrote and co-directed the original film, and their deadpan touch has not been lost. The new series opens with a simple gag that lays out the comic formula: the fearsome Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) gives his housemates a talking-to about leaving half-drained humans lying around with the same politely chiding tone one might use to complain about Tupperware containers in the sink.

The show adheres to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy of remakes, collecting a cast of ghouls mostly modeled to mimic the winning character dynamics of the film and letting them bounce off of one another. Nandor takes Waititi’s place as the happy-go-lucky member of the group, who nearly giggles with glee upon finding “creepy paper” for suitably macabre party decorations. (He’s mispronouncing crepe paper.) Matt Berry steps in for Clement as the malevolent Laszlo, the most hot-tempered in the house, a tempest in a bisexual, magnificently goateed teacup. Though these oddballs are joined by their insatiable bloodlust and their anachronistic quality as historical relics living in a modern world, their incompatibility leads to endless – and endlessly amusing – squabbles.

To further exacerbate the disagreement, Clement and Waititi have added a pair of new variables to the flat’s unstable environment. The first, Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), provides a key counterpoint to the machismo in the house. The original film described the coven of sanguivores as “one bit homoerotic dick-biting club”, and Demetriou’s weapons-grade eye-rolling carries on that auto-critique. The other is the series’ clear breakout star, “emotional vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch). Rather than latching his fangs on to a supple jugular, he saps the life force from those nearby by droning on about militantly boring topics ranging from proper Q-tip usage to tire axle rotation. He’s a human trip to the DMV, and the evil scarlet glow that emanates from his eyes during feeding is a sight gag that never wears thin.

Kayvan Novak and Harvey Guillen in What We Do in the Shadows. Photograph: FX

While the series takes an arc-based structure from the arrival of an Orlockian creature (motion-capture chameleon Doug Jones) and its mandate for the vampires to take over their home of Staten Island, there’s not much more to it all than hanging out with these characters. Not that there needs to be; the genre veneer and matching found-footage-horror camerawork nearly obscure the fact that this is a sitcom in the classical mode, where plugging the dramatis personae into various humorous circumstances has been a reliable recipe for success. It is in this respect that What We Do in the Shadows may be the rare film more well-suited to the televisual medium, a direct beneficiary of its extended minute count.

The vampiric puns and gravity-defying slapstick go a long way, but attention must be paid to the resident humans, the still-beating heart of the show. There’s an element of poignancy absent from the original in the relationship between Nandor and his mind-enslaved familiar, Guillermo (a soft-spoken Harvey Guillen). Sweet-natured Guillermo wants nothing more than to join the ranks of the nightwalkers, but Nandor treats him like something halfway between an undervalued employee and a taken-for-granted spouse. If the show was at risk of growing slight to a fault over time – the stakes of the vamps’ incompetent attempted invasion could not be lower – this genuine emotional thread guarantees a substantiveness that will take them far. Like the original, the show is in no small part about being a vampire and vampirism, the loneliness and isolation the lifestyle demands. The audience, then, takes Guillermo as a clear surrogate. We’re just glad to be part of this hidden world.