Eternally Yours: Till Death Do Us Part Is a Bit Useless When Nobody Dies (TV horror).
If the first trailer for Eternally Yours is running above this article, you may already have discovered one of the great drawbacks of immortality. It isn’t sunlight, wooden stakes or finding somewhere to hide several centuries of suspiciously repetitive tax records. It’s marriage.
CBS’s new supernatural comedy Eternally Yours concerns Charles and Liz, played by Ed Weeks and Allegra Edwards, a vampire couple who have been married for 500 years. The good news is that their union has survived plague, wars, revolutions, industrialisation and presumably the invention of LinkedIn. The bad news is that it has also survived each other.
Charles and Liz now live in present-day Seattle, where their once-burning romance has settled into the sort of comfortable eternal rut familiar to anyone who has ever found themselves debating dishwasher loading technique with the person they once considered unbearably exciting. Unfortunately, vampires have an additional difficulty. Divorce apparently isn’t an option. “Till death us do part” turns out to contain a rather serious contractual loophole when neither participant has the decency to die.
The domestic undead equilibrium is disturbed when their daughter Emma, played by Helen J Shen, brings home Max, her earnest human boyfriend, played by Jaren Lewison of Never Have I Ever. Parents objecting to the daughter’s boyfriend is hardly virgin sitcom territory, of course. Parents objecting because the boyfriend is a short-lived food species does at least add something new to the discussion around the dinner table.
The series comes from Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, the executive producers and showrunners behind the American Ghosts, which is probably the most reassuring item on its supernatural CV. Ghosts works because it understands that the paranormal machinery is merely there to make ordinary human problems wonderfully inconvenient. Eternity, possession and walking through walls are funny chiefly when someone still has to worry about the mortgage afterwards.
Rather pleasingly, Eternally Yours isn’t something CBS hurriedly manufactured after noticing that viewers rather like Ghosts. Port and Wiseman originally wrote a version of the pilot more than a decade ago, long before their current spectral hit. It failed to get made, but CBS remembered that peculiar script about two vampires trapped in an everlasting marriage when it later needed writers capable of adapting the British Ghosts for America. Somewhere in a television executive’s filing cabinet, an undead sitcom had simply been lying in its coffin waiting for somebody to lift the lid.
The revived programme expands matters beyond Charles, Liz, Emma and Max. Parker Young plays Jesse, a vampire married to the human Phyllis, played by Rose Abdoo, with Tristan Michael Brown and Shylo Molina appearing as their children Mort and Henry. That gives the writers several different ways to poke at relationships where mortality is distributed rather unevenly. One partner growing old while the other remains eternally ready for a nightclub may eventually make arguments about whose turn it is to put the bins out look rather quaint.
It also gives Eternally Yours somewhere interesting to go if it survives beyond its premise. Vampire comedy is hardly an unexplored crypt. What We Do in the Shadows has spent years demonstrating what happens when immortal predators encounter flat-sharing, bureaucracy and deeply unimpressive nightlife, while television has been turning vampires romantic, tragic, sexy and occasionally sparkly for decades. Simply having fangs won’t get a sitcom very far these days.
What looks more promising here is the decision to make immortality itself the relationship joke. Most romances end because somebody leaves, somebody dies or somebody eventually discovers the other person has been secretly watching the next episode without them. Charles and Liz don’t have the first two escape routes. Five hundred years is enough time to know every story, every irritating habit and probably every argument your spouse intends to deploy before they’ve actually opened their mouth.
The trailer suggests CBS is aiming for affectionate family comedy rather than buckets of arterial spray, which makes sense given the people behind it. There are vampire gags, generational misunderstandings and the considerable indignity of ancient creatures of the night having to negotiate modern social etiquette. The tone appears much nearer Ghosts than Interview with the Vampire. Nobody seems likely to spend six episodes staring moodily across a candlelit crypt wondering whether damnation has robbed existence of meaning when there is a perfectly good joke available about meeting your daughter’s boyfriend.
Ed Weeks has the useful air of a man capable of being simultaneously elegant and faintly exasperated, while Allegra Edwards, familiar to genre viewers from Upload, appears well suited to Liz’s particular flavour of immortal marital fatigue. Their chemistry will matter enormously. The central joke only works if we believe these two once adored each other, might possibly still adore each other and nevertheless occasionally contemplate opening the curtains at noon.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’re always prepared to give a television comedy involving undead family dysfunction a fair hearing. The supernatural sitcom graveyard contains plenty of shows that discovered a clever premise isn’t the same thing as having thirty clever episodes, but Port and Wiseman have already demonstrated with Ghosts that they understand the difference.
Eternally Yours premieres on CBS in the United States on Thursday 8 October 2026 at 8.30pm ET/PT, with streaming via Paramount+. Whether Charles and Liz can rediscover the spark after half a millennium remains to be seen.
Although, being vampires, perhaps “spark” is the wrong word. Open flame and extremely old upholstery are a dangerous combination.
