and Shannyn Sossamon replaced them. With an almost entirely different cast, a retooled full-length pilot for television audiences was shot. To promote the series, Silver, along with the rest of the main cast, attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 27, 2007, where the show was featured. According to Dohring, Silver had unexpectedly phoned him and said, "There's a role, and I'm making it younger". Dohring read two pages of script featuring Josef, and was interested by the character's "dark" and "sharp" personality. Dohring had to go through the normal audition process and was not sure if he would have gotten the role without Silver, who had "pushed it all the way through to the end". Munson explained that the goal of the casting changes was "to lighten the show up a bit". He believed the changes granted the studio's and network's wish to "make it a little younger and hipper". O'Laughlin felt that the whole cast's becoming "a little bit younger" especially affected the character Josef, as the originally chosen actor, Šerbedžija, was twice Dohring's age. The creators and the network were concerned that Josef, whose relationship with Mick was important, would appear as more of a "father figure" rather than as a friend. O'Laughlin supported the recasting of Josef with a younger actor due to the resulting "level of ease in that age difference". Reception "No Such Thing as Vampires" finished first among total viewers and adults 18–49 for its night. It was seen by 8.54 million American viewers, and received a 5.7 household rating and a 10% share of all televisions in use. The critical responses to the pilot were overall unfavorable. Several critics compared it detrimentally with the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel, as well as other vampire-related media, including Forever Knight, Blood Ties, The Night Stalker, Dark Shadows and the works of Anne Rice. Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle considered it as a "flat-out awful" pilot of what "may well be the worst new fall show". Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the pilot as "a weak, generic private-eye drama with a vampire story overlay", and Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe felt that it came close to a "full-on nightmare". The writing of the pilot was criticized as "ponderous", and having "familiar, conventional plots". One critic claimed it did not offer much "to inspire