By now, anyone who has followed Julio Torres’ career knows that he can think outside the box to make audiences laugh. Five years ago he had an HBO special titled My favorite shapesand the series he co-created, The Espookys, wasn’t exactly a standard comedy-horror movie. Now she’s back on HBO with a new series that will make everything she’s done before seem average by comparison, but it’s worth watching because of its extreme weirdness.
GHOSTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: Julio Torres (himself) dreams of online forms that cannot accept correct information, and of himself in a long, pointy hat and a puffy jacket, opening doors and curtains and only seeing walls behind them.
The essence: Julio visits Crayola headquarters, where different colors respond to customer service calls. He introduces a new light color and the executives she meets with wonder what the purpose is. “Coloring something light is acknowledging that things are different, and that’s okay.” What do you want to call the color? “Fatasmas”, which is “ghosts” in Spanish. An executive convinces him to do it in the singular: “Ghost.”
Julio hops into a rental car, driven by a chatty driver named Chester (Tomás Matos). Chester tells Julio to delete all of his car rental apps and just download his; he promises to even come pick him up if he leads someone else.
On the phone mounted in the back seat, a comedy called MELF is playing; It’s about an alien that crashes into the home of an Earth family. He loves to eat cookies and spaghetti for dinner. But the most interesting thing is that MELF (Marc Petrocino) and the father of the family (Paul Dano) fall in love. He leaves his wife (Sunita Mani) and abandons his children. Funny, right?
Chester and Julio pick up Julio’s robot assistant, Bibo (Joe Rumrill), who wants time off for a dental cleaning, even though he’s a robot. Bibo also shows another urgent letter from Julio’s owner, which Julio decides to ignore.
Julio hears a “siren song” in his head, gets out of the car and enters a jewelry store, where he finds a tiny crystal earring in the shape of an oyster. “He said it was part of a cursed antique, so I had to buy it,” he tells his “manager” Vanesja (Martine Gutiérrez) at a club. Of course, he then proceeds to lose it.
The two share Chester’s car with a teacher (Eudora Peterson), and Julio tells them how he can feel colors, shapes, sounds, and letters after he was struck by lightning as a child. For example, he tells the story of the letter Q (Steve Buscemi), which is too edgy and punk to be so early in the alphabet, surrounded by “normals” like P and R.
At her school, the teacher ends up using the boys’ room and is perplexed by a drawing of a penis that runs away from the viewer. She tries to find out which boy drew him and she finds a bully who gets angry at people who think he thinks he can’t, like wearing a purple shirt.
As Julio tries to figure out if the birthmark shaped like the oyster pendant he lost is growing, he records his recurring dream, where he wears the pointy hat, for analysis.
What shows will it remind you of? It is really very difficult to make a comparison between Ghosts and, well, any other show. Nominally, it is a sketching program, like A black lady sketch show and others similar (Ziwe, who had her own sketch series, guests in episode 2). But she has all the quirks of Torres’ last series. The Espookysand something else.
Our opinion: The first minutes of the first episode of Ghosts, which includes Emma Stone as one of its executive producers, along with Torres, is actually very strange, and we wondered if it was just going to be one of those shows that we just weren’t going to “get.” The minimalist sets, Torres’ positive but vaguely unpleasant demeanor, the symbolic representations of things as broad as “New York” and as specific as crayons… it was a lot to take in.
But as we are introduced to the people who will populate Julio’s world and sketches that further illustrate how Julio thinks and feels, things become a little easier to digest. Torres aims to be incidentally funny when it comes to scenes in which he interacts with people like Chester and Vanesja (pronounced “Vanessa”) and robots like Bibo, and even the sketches balance the funny with the strange and dramatic.
In it MELF In the sketch, for example, Dano’s character has to deal with estrangement from his family due to his choice. Buscemi is quite funny as the rebellious Q, but he is also alarmed when W, X, Y and Z rise to stardom as the strange letters he wanted to be.
Despite all this, Julio continues to search for this oyster pendant, convinced that if he compares it to his birthmark, which was once exactly the same size, he will be able to persuade a doctor that it is growing and needs attention. So, through the weirdness, Torres knows that a common thread is necessary to keep things anchored to reality, even if it is only by a microfine thread.
Of course, some of the sketches are just absurd, like when Bowen Yang plays a North Pole elf who testifies against Santa Claus for not paying his workers, or when Alexa Demie plays an overly dedicated insurance customer service representative. who bucks the system uses her computer for personal purposes and falls under the domineering spell of a different customer service representative (the aforementioned Ziwe) when she herself needs help.
But with all these insights into Torres’ psyche tied together by his search for the pendant, even if it’s a silly final line, all the absurdity and messages he’s trying to convey come together in a show that’s a laugh-inducing thought experiment. just when it seems like he’s taking himself too seriously.
Sex and skin: Nothing obvious, but there’s always a hint of success hovering over the show.
Parting Shot: While Bibo tries to get Julio out of his head to “see the real problem,” Julio becomes obsessed with the birthmark/mole, lamenting that “this is going to be a whole thing.”
Sleeping star: Martine Gutiérrez, who simply goes by “Martine” in the credits, is fascinating as Vanesja, who has a very fake, posh accent and is an actress who has acted as Julio’s manager for so long that she is now just his manager by default. .
Most pilot line: In a show that is intentionally strange, it’s difficult to identify a line or situation that is unconvincing, because perhaps Torres made it sound or seem unconvincing on purpose.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. Ghosts is a good example of a show where viewers just need to buckle up and enjoy the visual and aural ride, rather than trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. The less you try to compare it to any other show you’ve seen, the more you’ll enjoy this trip into Julio Torres’ head.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
