Bloody Good and Scary Bloody

HBO’s True Blood may have been this summer's more popular purveyor of hot vampire action, but for my money, BBC America’s Being Human, which has its second season finale tonight, is the juicier, spookier choice.

The first season was pretty playful, taking a goofy-seeming premise – a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost all share a flat in the UK’s Bristol – and mining it for something funny, sweet, and fearsome.

The title refers to the conflicted nature of each roommate – vampire Mitchell (Aidan Turner) has sworn off blood, but falls off the wagon with alarming regularity; werewolf George (Russell Tovey, forever teetering between a sniffle and a sob) fights tooth and nail to deny the animal within; and ghost Annie, murdered by her fiancé, would rather make endless cups of tea (one of the few “human”-like actions she can still take, even if she can’t actually drink it) than seriously consider passing over to the other side. They’re all “monsters” – certainly to society and often to themselves, too – and their struggle, always, is to try to be human, as much as they can.

The second season, which releases stateside on DVD on Sept. 21, has gone to significantly darker places, although George, mercifully, dissolves into tears less than in season one. The roommates pal around a lot less here, to the show’s detriment, but fair enough: They’ve all got a lot on their plate, what with Annie fighting the dark forces trying to drag her into some scary-looking netherworld (no celestial trumpets here), George having serious lady troubles, and Mitchell suddenly finding himself the new ruler of Bristol’s kingdom of vampires, after werewolf George, er, deposed the last ruler, Herrick (Jason Watkins, cheeky and creepy), in the season one finale.

Mitchell has the toothiest plots – this season he grappled with the return of an old friend (maybe rival), Ivan (Paul Rhys); the emergence of a new love interest, a doctor named Lucy (Lyndsey Marshal); and his own holy crusade to turn all the vampires in town into recovering blood addicts like himself. But in tonight’s season finale, all three roommates’ seemingly discrete storylines neatly dovetail. Fair warning: It gets dark. Really, really dark. And really, really bloody.

And no faeries allowed. Sorry, True Blood.

The season finale of Being Human airs tonight (9/18) at 7pm and reruns Sunday and Monday. Being Human: Season Two releases on DVD Sept. 21. Extras include featurettes devoted to the show’s standout makeup effects, the Swinging’ Sixties segment, and the seventh episode’s awesomely icky train-car bloodbath.