If you can’t get enough of Natasia Demetriou’s turn as Nadja in this season of What We Do In The Shadows—what with her running a celeb-killing nightclub, acting as maybe the worst beard ever for Guillermo, tossing out some deliciously delivered dialogue, and all the rest of it—then you not only have impeccable taste, but you’re also in luck: There’s another place to get your fix of Demetriou and her unique comedic sensibility. (William Hughes, I should mention, has done a fantastic job with his recaps of WWDITS, often making the case for more Nadja screentime and Nadja-centric major plots.) That place is HBO Max, and that show is Stath Lets Flats, a British comedy that ran on Channel 4 over three seasons from 2018 until last year. (And there could still be a fourth season: Creator/star/co-writer/Natasia Demetriou’s real-life brother Jamie recently said he’s “pausing” the show for now.)
To be clear, though, Nadja is nothing like Sophie, her character in Stath Lets Flats. (If the Britishisms and weird audible pronunciation of the title are throwing you, it translates to, roughly, Stath Rents Apartments.) Where her WWDITS vampire is all alpha confidence, Demetriou’s Sophie is meek, soft-spoken, sweet, and almost childlike, an aspiring dancer and actor and brother to the titular Stath, a letting agent in North London. In other words, where Nadja goes loud, telling the world to fuck off and expressing exactly how she feels, Sophie goes soft, awkwardly, gently, and passively floating through life with a half-smile.
But before I get ahead of myself: At its most basic, Stath Lets Flats is about communication—or the lack of it, rather. Jamie Demetriou’s Stath simply cannot string together sentences or articulate much of anything, quite the burden for a letting agent whose literal job is to make small talk and clearly explain the details of each property to prospective renters and not clumsily break household fixtures. (A sample description of a bathroom: “As you can see, this is an absolutely … shower.”) He has the gig because his Greek-Cypriot father (Christos Stergioglou) owns the agency. And, deep down and against any braggy statements to the contrary, he knows it. Part of the joy of watching the show, especially in the early episodes, is seeing the frustration on his face when he draws a blank on adjectives mid-thought or, after an affable smile, completely butchers a common phrase.
The rest of the workforce—this is, to a large extent, a workplace comedy, with shades of The Office—includes Dean (Kiell Smith-Bynoe, handily playing, even though it’s not a mockumentary, very much the Tim-from-The-Office voice of reason), the above-it-all overachiever Carole (Katy Wix, very funny), and the depressingly good spirited Al (Al Roberts, who’s fantastic here and who played Freddie, Guillermo’s British boyfriend, in this week’s What We Do In The Shadows). And then, outside the office, there’s Stath’s kind-of crush and Sophie’s BFF Katia (Ellie White, who has a real chemistry with Natasia Demetriou, her current co-star on BBC Three’s Ellie & Natasia).
Speaking of chemistry, Sophie’s almost zen-like calm and aloofness wonderfully contrast with Stath’s frenzied, often hard to follow ramblings. Take this moment from season one, after Stath embarrassingly showed a young couple a rubbish-filled garden:
“I feel like, I know I’m really good at everything, but when I do it, yeah, Sophie, it’s like a awful situation,” Stath starts.
Sophie shakes a water bottle stuffed with pistachio shells. “Nearly done it, filled it with shells,” she replies blankly.
“Why are you showing me that? I just said something very sad. Lift me up!”
“I don’t know, uh, well done … for letting the flat.”
“I didn’t let the flat, though, did I!”
And then there’s this one, with Stath, as he often does, having an existential crisis in his car. He turns to his sister to make a not-quite-apology:
“I’m not sorry, but it crushes me inside to think that I’ve upset you. Cause you’re like my best friend in my life, like the girl of my bloody dreams, man. But I’m just saying.”
She hugs him from the back seat, and he grabs her hand. And scene.
There is, see, always an undercurrent of sweetness running beneath the self-imposed chaos and idiocy. (Also, while Sophie might appear dim, multiple times throughout the show she sees her brother and the pickles he finds himself in quite clearly.) It’s a show with a unique, untainted-by-studio-hands vision, a continuation of the kind Channel 4 became known for in the aughts with the likes of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (which, coincidentally, was the first role for Natasia’s WWDITS co-star Matt Berry). And although it loses just a bit of its steam after season one—not unlike the enjoyable BBC Three mockumentary People Just Do Nothing—it more than makes up for it with a Sophie reveal in the penultimate episode (for the foreseeable future, anyway) that might have you, too, literally jumping for joy.