Eternally Yours asks: What if Ghosts, but vampires?

The writers who scared up the U.S. adaptation of Ghosts sink their teeth into vampires laying low in suburbia.

By Matt Webb Mitovich | October 5, 2026 | 3:00pm

Photo: Bertrand Calmeau/CBS

TV Reviews Eternally Yours

Eternally Yours asks: What if Ghosts, but vampires?

Some ideas, like immortal creatures of the night, just refuse to die. Joe Port and Joe Wiseman first pitched their new supernatural comedy, Eternally Yours, 11 years ago, but it didn’t get past the pilot stage—though that was before Port and Wiseman successfully adapted BBC One’s Ghosts for CBS. Between their shared creative braintrust and the 8:30 p.m. Thursday time slot Eternally Yours is about to stake out—save for a pair of holiday specials, Ghosts won’t be back with season 6 until early next year—it’s clear someone’s hoping that viewers draw a line between these two shows. And that’s before you even get into the contents of Eternally Yours, which is, to put it bluntly, “What if Ghosts, but vampires?”

Eternally Yours stars Ed Weeks and Allegra Edwards as Charles and Liz Blythe, lovebirds in 1526 Austria who pledge their lives to one another when he, a vampire, sinks his fangs into her waiting, mortal neck. Thing is, 500 years is a really long time to be married to the same person, they’ve come to realize, and as such we find Charles and Liz in a bit of a rut as the series opens. Helen J. Shen plays the couple’s daughter Emma, adopted but also a vampire—what, you have a better cure for diphtheria?—and she can’t bring herself to tell her folks that she is dating a regular ol’, employed-by-the-Social Security Administration human. When said beau, Max (Jaren Lewison), coincidentally finds himself at the Blythes’ doorstep on official SSA business—whoops, someone has been collecting benefits for far too many decades—it’s not long before he learns their bloody surprising secret. That sounds like a spoiler, but it’s not. Nor is it the biggest twist in the first and only episode available for review.

The Blythe coven is also comprised of Jesse (Parker Young), a fitness trainer who spray tans so as to not disappear in the gym’s mirrors, and his wife Phyllis (the hilarious Rose Abdoo), who is kept oblivious to the household’s vampire situation via frequent mind wipes. That wonderfully odd couple has a pair of teenage sons, Henry and Mort—the former a tortured brooder à la Edward Cullen, the latter frustrated that his only super power is to read the mind of Argus, the family dog. Not exciting stuff, that.

Eternally Yours allows itself a major liberty when it comes to vampire lore: the Blythes are able to roam about in the daylight, though it significantly helps that they live in famously overcast Seattle. And yet the pilot episode, at least, feels terribly claustrophobic, with a majority of its scenes confined to the Blythe house. One could argue that Ghosts has managed to deal with this very same obstacle, as its titular spooks are bound to the property where they died. It raises the question of what future episodes of Eternally Yours will look like, though Port recently assured reporters that with Charles employed as a financial advisor, Liz a college professor, and Emma a veterinarian, we will see these characters out in the world, living their afterlives.

Arriving nearly two years after FX’s What We Do In The Shadows concluded its lauded, six-season run, Eternally Yours faces a “Simpsons Already Did It” conundrum in that much fun has already been made and had by vampires laying low in suburbia. (Case in point, the logline for the October 22 episode has the Blythes hosting a party attended by esteemed members of their vampire community. How will Emmy-winning guest star Jeff Hiller stack up against Shadows‘ Doug Jones?) But there’s a lighter, brighter “network sitcom” sensibility at play here that portends to set Eternally Yours apart.

“Life is tough, and then you continue to not die,” Charles tells Emma as she laments centuries of dating travails. A beat later, when Liz reminds Emma that one of her past boyfriends fed on a mailman instead of, as is their ethical preference, a “bad” person, Charles sniffs, “They can’t always be the worst of the worst.”

Eternally Yours shows promise, though one has to wonder why Max is clued into Emma’s family secret so early on. Similarly, a closing twist feels more like the stinger to a season finale. Is the freshman comedy ticking obvious boxes too quickly? Time will tell. And being immortal, the Blythes have all the time in the world.

Eternally Yours premieres Thursday, October 8 at 8:30 p.m. ET on CBS.

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