Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tooth Pari: When Love Bites’ On Netflix, Where A Vampire Who Has Lost Her Tooth Falls For A Shy Dentist

We’ve figured out why people like vampire shows: The rules regarding vampires are pretty well known. Sunlight burns their skin. They’re affected by silver and garlic. If they bite someone and their blood mixes with their victims’, the victim gets converted. And romances between vampires and humans are, um, problematic. A new Indian series takes those rules and adds some new legends to the mix.

Opening Shot: A man tells a woman to say aah. We see a mouth open from the inside, a wiggling nerve sticking out of one of a broken canine.

The Gist: At a bar, a woman asks a guy she just meets to go back to his hotel room. But she’s not just any woman: Rumi (Tanya Maniktala) is a vampire, and a rebellious one at that. While the vampires that reside in Kolkata are supposed to remain deep underground, Rumi goes “Upar” on the regular, looking for fresh blood. Today, she’s brought along Sreela (Anindita Bose), who is going “upar” for the first time. Rumi tells Sreela that the threat that they’ll be decapitated by the Cutmundus is overblown; that legend has to be at least 50 years old, and the humans that are part of the Cutmundus are all likely dead.

When they go back underground, they need to avoid the wrath of the community’s human leader, AD (Adil Hussain), who has threatened that he will wake up a supreme vampire named Ora (Anish Railkar), who will mete out severe punishment to anyone who goes above ground.

Meanwhile, Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari), a shy dentist who does cooking videos on the side, is resistant to being set up by his parents. One arranged date goes extraordinarily poorly, but he still agrees to accompany her to a dance party in Chinatown the next day. Rumi is also there, and she observes Roy mixing a drink for the bartender as his date dances with her boyfriend.

Rumi is out for blood again, but when she invites a man to an empty restaurant, something goes wrong when she bites his neck. She hits something hard, and one of her canines breaks and falls to the floor. Some of her blood mixes with his, a no-no since one of the unspoken rules to going Upar is to not convert humans into vampires.

Meanwhile, the man who was bitten goes to the cops, who almost laugh him out of the room. They hand him over to Inspector Kartik Pal (Sikandar Kher), who has investigated supernatural claims in the past. He’s the laughingstock of the district, but Pal — whose senile father tells the neighborhood children ghost tales — takes the man’s report seriously.

After consulting a displaced vampire about her tooth, Rumi finds herself in Roy’s office, right as he’s making a cooking video. When he goes to fix her broken canine, with the wiggly nerve, he accidentally pricks his finger. The drop of blood falls into Rumi’s mouth and is more satisfying than the pints she’s guzzled from others, but Roy passes out. She wakes him up and tells him she’ll be back. But she can’t be without her canine for much longer — and her trips Upar are getting riskier, as AD is closer to finding out.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Tooth Pari: When Love Bites is more romantic than True Blood, but funnier. But it’s not quite as funny as What We Do In The Shadows.

Our Take: At the heart of Tooth Pari: When Love Bites is a simple, forbidden love story, Romeo And Juliet with vampires, as it were. Rumi isn’t supposed to be among the humans at all, and every time she goes above ground she risks being found out and decapitated. In the last 50 years, the vampire population under Kolkata has stayed very small, and every time she’s absent, the more chance there is that she’ll be found out.

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But the draw of being with Roy, especially his invigorating blood, is going to be too strong for Rumi to ignore. And considering that all Roy wants is to date someone that he has things in common with, this should be an funny and interesting romance to follow.

We loved the vision of the underground created by writer/director Pratim D. Gupta; it’s complex and dark (but not dark enough to fool our TV into making the picture almost black), with a mythology that’s easy to follow. The fact that Rumi wants to go above ground may not just be about blood, but about not being with the same 30 vampires all the time. As much as she may think humans are scum, live seems to be a lot more thrilling above ground than it is under it.

Will the show veer into goofiness? Maybe. But we’d rather see a vampire show about love and taking chances than one about mopey vampires who wish they were human again.

Sex and Skin: All talk, and no nudity at all.

Parting Shot: Inspector Pal, talking to Rumi’s victim in the restaurant where she bit him, finds a tooth by the column he said she had him against. It’s “as long as a man’s pinkie” and the tip is covered in blood.

Sleeper Star: The show’s visual effects team did a really good job showing the underground world where the vampires live.

Most Pilot-y Line: An older vampire named Meera (Tillotama Shome) tries to distract AD when the silver in his robe affects Rumi. “You used to strip your silver half-pants and come running to me.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Tooth Pari: When Love Bites looks like it’ll be a combination of sweet and salty, a comedy about vampire legends and forbidden love that should move quickly enough to keep viewers entertained.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.