Be honest: if someone told you about a new TV series about a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost who share an apartment, wouldn’t you think it was a cartoon? Or, at best, a wacky tweener sitcom, a la “The Munsters”? Given that I grew up on such Saturday morning series as “Drac Pak” and “The Monster Squad,” I could actually get behind either of those things, but “Being Human,” the new TV series in question, is actually an hour-long drama, one which made its Stateside premiere on BBC America on July 25th.

I could hear a lot of you suddenly exhaling with relief after reading where the show was airing, and it’s understandable. The concept sounds positively ridiculous, but there’s something about the knowledge that it’s airing on BBC America that lends credibility to even the most ludicrous of premises, simply because you know they’re going to treat it seriously. You might not know how, but you know they will. And, of course, it adds immeasurably to the show’s credibility to know that it was created by Toby Whithouse, who’s written for “Doctor Who” and “Torchwood.”

Still, it’s comforting to know that the cast of “Being Human” – Russell Tovey (the werewolf), Aidan Turner (the vampire), and Lenora Crichlow (the ghost) – were equally uncertain when they were pitched the idea of the series.

“We’ve been asked the question quite a bit about how we felt when we first heard it,” said Crichlow, “and even when I explain now to people what the show is about, I see them…”

“Glaze over,” chimed in Tovey.

“To be honest with you, it’s in the scripts and in the characters,” Crichlow continued. “I mean, it just works. But it’s almost the most ridiculous idea in the world. I remember getting the call, and I didn’t know if it was comedy or drama or what the hell it was. But I was two or three pages in, and, ‘Oh, wow, I get it now.’ It’s the fact that these guys want to be human, that it’s steeped in this realism, and that makes it work so well. It’s a credit to Toby. He just made it very easy for us. This was a job that you couldn’t say ‘no’ to. First on, we knew it was something quite special and different and, dare I say, even kind of original in some ways.”

“Yeah, it’s an actor’s show,” agreed Tovey. “The characters go through so many emotions, and there’s so much you can do. I mean, I’m screaming one minute and naked the next minute. I’m crying. I’m laughing. Naked again, screaming again. It’s just such an amazing writing and a great concept and exactly what you want to do as an actor in your mid-20s.

“Oddly enough, I think we’re playing real people in this as opposed to playing supernatural,” said Turner. “That’s why it’s so interesting for us to play a vampire, to play a werewolf, and not the sort of typical way, if there is one, which wouldn’t be as interesting as playing these real characters with real afflictions and real problems and real issues. It’s just so much fun.”

There are a lot of easy comparisons to various bits within the show, most notably Tovey’s transformation into a werewolf. When one critic observed that one sequence came within a hairsbreadth of being a shot-for-shot recreation of a scene in “An American Werewolf in London,” Whitlow merely smiled and replied, “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” And as far as the timing of having a show which features a vampire turn up just as the second season of “Twilight” has premiered and the next “Twilight” movie is forthcoming…well, it’s a darned nice bit of luck, but it’s also completely coincidental.

“I don’t know if you know, but the development process for this show was very circuitous and very frustrating,” Whithouse revealed. “It started off as a straight drama about a group of college graduates who buy a house together, and consequently, I was hired to devise this. I created the three characters, and went into a lot of detail with them, had them all sort of mapped out, but they were all completely human. Because we had a lot of difficulty finding a story for this, I suggested rather in a kind of kamikaze fashion, saying, ‘Well, we could always turn George into a werewolf,’ and then it just seemed like a natural progression to give way to characters where we were already pointing that Mitchell could become a vampire and Annie could become a ghost. I mean, that’s a condensed version of a process that took about two years. It’s incredibly fortuitous that it happened to be happening at a time when vampire stock is very high.”

Whithouse has managed to blend comedy, drama, and horror in a very interesting way, but it’s one that, at least to him, seems very natural. “My thing is you don’t live in one genre constantly, and I’ve always tried to replicate that in my writing,” he explained. “You can be having a perfectly normal conversation with somebody. That doesn’t negate something either extremely tragic happening or extremely comedic. When those things happen, when life suddenly takes a left turn, you don’t suddenly think, ‘Oh, my God, we changed genre.’ Generally, life is constantly evolving and shifting, so this is a very natural human thing. You can have an incredibly comedic scene and then suddenly something awful can happen, and I think the weight of that is then magnified. By the same token, in real life, you can have a very tragic situation and to lighten the mood, to leaven it, somebody will make a gag. I think you see shows that kind of stay in one group and stay in one tone constantly. My feeling has always been that life doesn’t stick to one thing and never change tonally. It’s constantly shifting.

“I think one of the kind of successes about the show has been that you can tell a massive, massive story and also a very tiny story. So you’ve got vampires uprising, for example, and at the same time, you’ve got somebody thinking, ‘Oh, my God, can I actually enter into a relationship?’ So you’re telling huge stories and tiny stories, yet for the characters, the stakes are exactly the same level. You can kind of look at humanity in a completely different way, even if it’s kind of minutiae, because it’s that minutiae of these characters that’s kind of fundamentally important. because they’ve lost their humanity, and that was something they’re actually striving for, aspiring to, each in a different level.”

“Being Human” can currently be seen on BBC America.