I didn’t expect to like Eternally Yours as much as I did. I’m not really a vampire person — I’ve seen What We Do in the Shadows, I get the genre, and I usually find the whole blood-and-brooding thing a little exhausting. But this one snuck up on me. It helps that it doesn’t take itself seriously.

Charles and Liz have been married five hundred years and they’re bored, and the show knows that’s the joke. Not dramatic eternal angst — just the quiet, specific boredom of a couple who’ve run out of new things to say to each other.

Ed Weeks plays Charles like a man who’s seen everything and is mildly annoyed by all of it, which is somehow the funniest thing on the show. When he tells a human you get to die, it’s not a threat. It’s almost wistful.

Allegra Edwards as Liz is the emotional center, and she makes the marriage feel real in a way that surprised me. There’s a scene where she’s just looking at Charles across the room and you can see five centuries of history in her face without a word of dialogue. That’s the kind of thing that makes a sitcom feel bigger than thirty minutes.

Helen J. Shen as Emma is my favorite, the adopted daughter of Charles and Liz. She’s dry, a little sarcastic and sometimes a little mean but completely believable as someone who’s spent her whole life being the normal one in a house full of immortals. Jaren Lewison’s character of Max is the audience surrogate, and he plays the oh no, my girlfriend’s family is vampires panic with real warmth instead of cartoonish screaming. The supporting cast — Parker Young, Rose Abdoo, the twin brothers — all feel lived-in, like they’ve been in that house forever, which, given the premise, they basically have. What I keep coming back to is the heart of it. Under all the supernatural stuff, it’s a show about whether a relationship can last when forever stops being romantic and starts being routine. That’s not a vampire question. That’s a human question, and the show treats it with more tenderness than I expected from a network comedy.

The pilot rushes some things, and the humor occasionally leans on the same vampires don’t get modern life gag a few times too many. But when it works — and it works more often than not — it feels like sitting in on a family dinner where the family happens to be undead. Seven out of ten from me. It is highly watchable, funny and real.