The premise of the show is simple and cheeky: a vampire (Mitchell), a werewolf (George), and a ghost (Annie) attempt to live together and maintain a semblance of a normal life. They routinely fail spectacularly, getting embroiled in supernatural goings-on - vampires trying to take over the world in the first and third seasons, and human supernatural hunters in the second. It’s good - it started, as mentioned, with a 2008 pilot, and then kicked off properly in 2009 and ran for five seasons. But we’ll cover it here, because it’s not really a show that had an influence on Doctor Who going forward: it’s one that, by its existence, demonstrates the influence Doctor Who was having.
And yet if you are to look for obvious influences on Being Human you’d end up in the 90s looking at the wave of goth-inspired vampire stories in the wake of the Interview with a Vampire movie. The ur-text here is probably White Wolf Entertainment’s World of Darkness line of role-playing games, the flagship of which was Vampire: The Masquerade. This game was an important moment of cultural history in terms of the steady merger of the goth scene and geek culture (see also the Sylvester McCoy era), synthesizing as much classic vampire fiction as possible into a game set in a gothed up and sexy version of the then-present day. Indeed, there are many points where Being Human feels like someone dusting off their old World of Darkness campaign notes and turning them into a television series.
Its self-descriptor - gothic-punk - is an interesting phrase, both because of the strange ahistorical nature of it (goth is, after all, an aesthetic that derived from punk) and because it situated Vampire: The Masquerade in its more relevant tradition, namely the “____punk” tradition kicked off by cyberpunk. That is to say, grim stories with tortured and fairly violent antiheroes wearing mirror shades at night. Matching traditional horror fiction tropes up with it is one of those ideas that’s both reasonably clever and so dead obvious it hurts. And so despite being trapped in one of the grimiest corners of nerd culture, White Wolf ended up accurately calling how vampires were going to work from now on.
(Yes, huge swaths do go back to Anne Rice, but Rice is ultimately writing romantic vampires. White Wolf formulated the aesthetic, though. They may have called it gothic punk, but in hindsight the correct name is self-evidently fangpunk.)
So Being Human comes out of that tradition, as a sort of standard issue British downsizing of the concept. In a fangpunk world we have… a pair of washout monsters and a neurotic ghost in a flat share comedy. In Bristol. It’s an entertaining take on what was, by this time, an overcooked and past its prime aesthetic anyway. (The degree to which Vampire: The Masquerade belongs to its era is striking. The “masquerade” of the title refers to efforts to keep people from knowing vampires exist. The entire thing is unimaginable in an age of cell phone videos and YouTube.) It’s all quite solid.
But why would we say that this is post-Doctor Who and not make the more obvious and wholly defensible claim that it’s post-Buffy? Yes, Toby Whithouse wrote an episode of Doctor Who and is going to come back to do more, but that’s something of a thin line to take when we’re dealing with contemporary horror tropes in a show that flits easily between comedy and drama. There’s a strong case to be made that Being Human is Buffy only about being in your twenties.
On a purely causal level, of course, we do have to admit that Doctor Who’s massive success made commissioning a supernatural drama for BBC Three an easier lift. Equally, it’s fallacious to suggest that all British sci-fi and fantasy is automatically in Doctor Who’s wake. Nor can you credit Doctor Who with the embrace of tone changes that defines Being Human. You might make a case that Whithouse does finales similarly to Davies, using the same basic “start spinning lots of plates and then switch among them quickly enough that the audience forgets about one” structure. But this is hardly Davies’s invention either.
In many ways it’s easier to answer this by looking at the ways in which Being Human differs from Buffy. The obvious one is that its vampire is not defined primarily by his tortured soul. Being Human defines Mitchell primarily as a recovering addict, not as someone endlessly tortured by his conscience and seeking redemption. Mitchell may occasionally fall down the redemption path, but for the most part is more defined by simply wanting to live a normal life. The contrast with Angel is profound - there’s none of the anguished self-torturing and constant need to atone. There’s just a guy trying to do better.
More broadly, there’s a change to the underlying metaphoric structure from Buffy. The trick with Buffy was always to use the supernatural as a way to mythologize ordinary and mundane travails. So “I slept with this guy and he turned mean” becomes “I slept with this guy and he lost his soul and tried to destroy the world.” But that’s not quite Being Human’s game. Being Human mostly treats the supernatural on its own terms. George being a werewolf isn’t really a metaphor for anything. It’s just a particularly annoying problem he has that causes him unique and idiosyncratic consequences. Annie’s life comes the closest to being overtly metaphoric, but even there it’s more a tool for observing domestic violence than it is a way of blowing up the concept into mythic terms.
Instead, Being Human treats the mythic as an eccentric space in the mould of Torchwood, and is largely about the experience of living on the border of such a space. It’s telling that all three characters are nobodies. One is genuinely invisible to the world. The other two work low-rent, forgettable jobs in a dingy hospital. They exist in the space between two worlds - they are nobodies both in the mundane and supernatural contexts. There’s an argument to be made that this is also quintessentially British - a flat share sitcom on the margins of vast world-changing powers is, in one sense, a perfect metaphor for a country with more than a little obsession with its own faltering global power. But more important than this cynical reading is the basic way in which it embraces the longstanding British tradition of eccentric spaces. Here we have a story about living on the disused margins of the narrative.
This also helps explain why Being Human is more like Doctor Who than it is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a show about the gaps between worlds and genres. Mitchell, George, and Annie have fallen out of the world, and now sit in its gutters. It’s a show about transgressing the lines between worlds. It’s arguably, in fact, what Torchwood always should have been. (Indeed, there’s a bit of cheekiness here. Whithouse names his first episode “Flotsam and Jetsam,” the original title for the Torchwood Season One premiere.)
It’s easy to misread Doctor Who as being primarily about genre mashups. But at it’s best it’s slightly different - it’s about exploring the consequences of breaching narrative spaces. It’s about asking what happens if you break an underlying rule of a genre. This is the big way it differs from Buffy and indeed from Joss Whedon’s work in general. Whedon is all about fusing genres together into a coherent whole. But Doctor Who is specifically about the dissonance of the genres. What Torchwood in its original conception promised was to explore what happens when a genre moves in next door, but ultimately it got seduced by its genre and lost that. So Being Human simplifies it, focusing on the literal act of living adjacent to a genre.
It also shows Whithouse’s breadth and skill. He’s talked in interviews about how much Alan Moore influenced him, and that comes out fairly clearly in Being Human. For one thing, there’s a key plot beat at the end of Season Three that is taken almost straight from Miracleman. But there are other bits too. George’s monologue in the pilot about his bloodlust, with the gobsmackingly good line about how “they said the windpipe came away with a sigh of air from the lungs that was still warm” is straight-up pinched from the Moore toolbox and his usual trick of trying to find ways to capture utterly alien experiences. What’s interesting is the way in which George’s bloodlust is defined in terms that keep it alien and disturbing. There’s no attempt to draw a metaphor to everyday existence.
This sense of keeping strange things strange is, again, a close cousin to Doctor Who. Indeed, Being Human goes further down this road than Doctor Who usually does. Doctor Who has explored the alien, but usually in a Buffy style of using it as a metaphor for the mundane. Its willingness to engage with unfathomable otherness has been limited at best; the one time it’s come close, the unfathomable other has literally been the devil. But the underlying ethic of Doctor Who has remained very pro-strangeness even as its sense of what is actually strange has withered. Strangeness, after all, is what comes from falling out of worlds.
The difference, of course, is that Doctor Who is fundamentally optimistic about strangeness, while at the end of the day Being Human is a horror show. And yet it avoids being a xenophobic horror show. Ultimately there is nothing scarier in the first season than Owen’s finally letting the mask slip and trying to kill Annie all over again. It’s very pointedly not a show about how the alien and the strange is evil - all of our main characters, after all, are, by their own admission, monsters.
But this is, in the end, what makes it a post-Doctor Who show as opposed to a Doctor Who clone. Being Human isn’t about trying to mimic the work of Doctor Who. It’s taking the concerns of Doctor Who and looking at them from an alternate angle. It’s something we’ve not really seen anywhere in the history of Doctor Who before save arguably in the spinning off of the Faction Paradox line: a series that looks at what Doctor Who does and replies, “yes, but you can also do this.”
In many ways the ability to do this comes from the changes Davies has made. Davies made Doctor Who a show that steals from everything on television. But he also began changing the nature of how Doctor Who relates to boxes. As Richard Jones said back in his guest post on Big Brother, in Doctor Who a box is a way to exit one space and enter another - entering the box of television means being in a completely different world. Whereas in most drama the box of television is about showing the world of the people who live inside it. Being Human recognizes that these two concepts share a common trope that can be exploited: the apartment. Our own little boxes (made of ticky tacky) in which we stash our worlds. And so Being Human offers a slightly different take - “what is it like to live in a magic box parked adjacent to the ordinary world?”
What jumps out here is that there’s no reason that the premise has to end here. Being Human isn’t pulling some special trick. There are, after all, all sorts of things one can put in a magic box, and different sorts of relationships it can have with the real world. Being Human is about monsters, which are a very good thing to put in a magic box, but hardly your only option. What matters is television that’s working in the same conceptual space.