TV: Eterally Yours (2026- )

New sitcom; CBS Thursday nights, then streaming at Paramount+. Only one episode has aired, and the ending of that episode sends the show veering in a very different direction than the first 20 minutes had led us to expect. It's hard to talk about that show without talking about that ending, so this will be a bit more spoilery than my usual comments, at least for this specific episode. But like most first episodes, it's all setup anyway, so I don't feel too bad about giving away that ending.

The original pilot script for this show has been bouncing around Hollywood for a decade or more. At one point, it was considered dead enough to be featured on the podcast Dead Pilots Society, in which each episode features a table read of a TV pilot that never made it to air and an interview with the writers. It was good enough, though, to get writers Joe Port and Joe Wiseman a job as showrunners for CBS's adaptation of the British sitcom Ghosts. Now that it's finally made it to air, it is somewhat baffling to me that CBS hasn't paired it with Ghosts. To be sure, the idea of creating a schedule that will keep audiences from changing the channel between shows is less important than it was, now that most people are watching things on streaming anyway, but still, two supernatural-themed sitcoms would seem a logical pair.

The supernatural element of this one is vampires. We meet Liz (Allegra Edwards) and Charles (Ed Weeks, who had played the same role in that podcast table read) in 1526 when they are young and so in love that Liz is willing to be made a vampire to marry Charles. Five hundred years later, they're still married -- vampires are not allowed to divorce, we are told --  and suffering through a really long marital rut.

Their adopted daughter, Emma (Helen J. Shen), has also been made a vampire in order to save her life during a childhood illness. She's got a new boyfriend, Max (Jaren Lewison), and her parents don't approve of her dating a human.

Also living in the family home are other members of the vampire coven (I'd never heard that word applied to vampires before). Jesse (Parker Young) is a personal trainer who appears to be in his late twenties; his human wife, Phyllis (Rose Abdoo), is in her mid-70s, and gets her memory wiped whenever she stumbles into learning about the vampires. They have twin sons -- one whom got all the "good" vampire powers, and the other can talk to the dog.

So it seems very clear for the first 20 minutes or so what sort of a show we're headed for. Max and Emma date; Liz and Charles frown with disapproval; there will be lots of "oops! he almost found out we're vampires!" moments and misunderstandings.

And then -- here comes that mildly spoilery twist ending -- while visiting Emma's home for the first time, Max gets bonked on the head hard enough to kill him, and Charles has to bite him in order to save his life. And suddenly, it's not a show about the human boyfriend and his girlfriend's big secret; instead, it's a show about the new vampire learning what it means to be a vampire and how to hide that secret from his own friends and family.

That's not a bad concept for a show in its own right, and probably an improvement given that the memory-wiping shtick with Jesse and Phyllis is already wearing thin by the end of the pilot, but it's an odd choice to spend all that time setting up one show only to pull the rug out from under us in the last two minutes. Feels like a risky move; people who liked the show they thought they were getting could be alienated by the abrupt switcheroo, and people who disliked the apparent concept may have bailed out before finding out that the show they were actually getting would have been more appealing.

Sitcoms are always harder to judge out of the gate. They need more time to set up the premise and to figure out what particular comic skills their cast has, and which combinations of actors work best to tell which jokes. And this one is so busy setting up and discarding premises that it has even less time than usual to develop any of its characters beyond a single characteristic. But the cast is always at least likable, and in some of them, I can see potential for their character to develop in interesting ways.

A strange pilot, but with just enough talent and potential to keep me watching for a week or two to see how things develop.