The CW’s new Wellington Paranormal is what would happen COPS met The X-Files, but they conceived a child that turned out to be a sort of deadpan Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show.

Which is a roundabout way to praise the show, a sequel or continuation of What We Do in the Shadows. It was created by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, who created and starred in that 2014 film. (Waititi and Clement also created the FX series What We Do in the Shadows, but there’s no direct tie-in between that and Wellington Paranormal.) The CW picked up the series from TVNZ 2, the New Zealand network that first aired the television series in July of 2018.

In the pilot, Officers Minogue (Mike Minogue) and O’Leary (Karen O’Leary), who played the same roles in the movie, happen upon a young woman possessed by something inexplicable. This gets them drafted into the Paranormal Division of the Wellington Police, where Sgt. Makka (Makka Pohatu) hides in a secret office (actually a storage closet) behind a bookcase at the police station.

Makka tries to school the pair with his knowledge of the occult, but Minogue and O’Leary are just too dim to really get one step ahead of their supernatural targets, using their (basically useless) by-the-book police protocols with every encounter with the otherworldly.

The show is shot in the same mockumentary style as What We Do in the Shadows, but it feels more natural here, as the format was used for decades on shows like COPS. Unlike COPS, though, Wellington Paranormal is terribly amusing and loads of fun. O’Leary and Minogue have an uncanny knack for never seeing what’s really going on, while we the audience are always in on the joke.

One tip: you might want to use the closed captioning while you watch. The kiwi accent isn’t totally impenetrable, but the jokes land better when you can catch every word, like when Minogue and O’Leary try the “good cop/bad cop” approach on a demon. But try to keep your eyes on the screen: there is a lot going on in the background and all of it is funny.

The first two episodes, available online (on both The CW app and HBO Max) feature a demonic possession where an entity hops from body to body, possessing everyone from a family in town to a dog to another officer, and a riotous encounter with alien seed pods that grow into semi-sentient mimics. Future episodes will feature werewolves, ghosts, and heaven help us, evil clowns.

That is, if Wellington Paranormal sticks around. The show debuted to literally zero ratings on The CW, where it is airing in a punishing Sunday night time period (8pm EST/PST). There are plenty of episodes available, though; it was enough of a hit in its native land to warrant three, soon to be four, seasons. Hopefully they all make it here.