TV Review: Ghosts
Ghosts is a new show on CBS. It’s quite good, and I recommend it. Warning: Here be SPOILERS.
Ghosts is about a haunted house. It is a rather crowded haunted house. There are eight major ghosts haunting the main part of the house, and a vast crowd of nameless cholera victims haunting the basement.
Samantha (Sam) is a young New York writer, or would-be writer. Her great-aunt passes away (presumably intestate) leaving her a huge 300 year old house. The building is gorgeous, but in dire need of repairs and renovation. Sam and her husband Jay (some sort of NYC office worker) debate whether to sell the house, turn it into a Bed & Breakfast, or what. Both agree it’s big and beautiful, a better place to raise children than their fifth-floor walkup.
Sam falls down the stairs. She suffers a concussion and is taken away in an ambulance. She spends two weeks in the hospital; she is clinically dead for three minutes. When she returns, she can see and hear the ghosts. They don’t want to live in a hotel, therefore they have decided to haunt Sam and Jay away.
Who’s Who in Cast and Crew
With eight ghosts it will take a while to learn all the names. For a while fans will be referring to them as the Boy Scout, the Viking, the Black lady, the flower child, etc.
- Rose McIver as Samantha, heiress to Woodhouse
- Utkarsh Ambudkar as Jay, her husband
- Brandon Scott Jones as Isaac, Gay Revolutionary War veteran
- Richie Moriarty as Pete, Boy Scout leader, arrow through his neck
- Asher Grodman as Trevor, yuppie with no pants
- Rebecca Wisocky as Hetty Woodhouse, robber baron’s wife, Sam’s ancestress
- Sheila Carrasco as Flower, flower child killed by bear on her way home from Woodstock
- Danielle Pinnock as Alberta, Black jazz singer
- Roman Zaragoza as Sasappis, Native American
- Devan Chandler Long as Thorfinn, Viking
And a whole lot of cholera victims in the basement. I suspect Woodhouse Mansion was built atop a mass grave. Eventually the cholera victims may differentiate themselves one from another, but right now they’re just a mob.
The upstair ghosts have as little to do with the basement ghosts as possible.
Joe Port and Joe Wiseman adapted the British TV show Ghosts for American audiences. (Norman Lear often did likewise.)They wrote the first two episodes. The original British show was done by the same folks as did the award-winning Horrible Histories.
How Does It Work in This Universe?
Jay has reluctantly accepted that the house is haunted, and that Sam can see and communicate with the ghosts. The first two episodes he was sure that Sam was hallucinating, as the result of a concussion and a fortnight-long coma.
As with Disney’s short-lived One Hundred Lives of Black Jack Savage the ghosts are condemned to wear in the afterlife the clothes they wore when they died, which is why promiscuous Yuppie Trevor is devoid of trousers. (Remember when Jack bragged to Barry Tarberry how good he would have looked in Armani, if only he’d had the chance?) Ghosts find it uncomfortable at best and painful at worst when living human beings walk through them. Unique to Isaac, he emits a flatulent-like smell when people walk through him. This odor is noticeable to the Living as well as the dead. ’Tis completely involuntary. Isaac cannot control it.
Thorfinn can affect electrical devices. He was killed when struck by lightning. “Metal helmet maybe not good idea,” he admitted centuries later. He is also a bit of a neatnick. He dreads the idea of the mansion becoming a Bed & Breakfast full of litterbug guests.
Alberta was a jazz singer in the Roaring ’20s. When she hums, the living can hear her. Although she died of a heart attack, she is convinced she was murdered and she wants Sam to investigate her murder. She also wants to know if her music is on Spotify.
Like many women who lived when Victoria sat on the throne of England, Hetty is female but not feminist. She didn’t agree with female suffrage until Alberta set her straight. (Alberta lived through the 19th Amendment.) Alberta changed her mind, bur Hetty still doesn’t approve of women going to college. She reminds me of the scene in Roots where Sandy Duncan explained to her maid that whites were naturally smarter than Blacks, just like men were naturally smarter than women.(I have wondered for years for many takes they needed for that scene before the actresses could recite such nonsense with a straight face. I’m sure Leslie Uggams swore the first time they attempted that scene.) Hetty, who lived through the No-Irish-Need-Apply era, is biased against the Irish.
Flower indulged in too many illegal substances when she was alive. They still affect her brain even now that she’s dead.
Trevor, as the most recently dead, can with great effort, affect the physical world slightly. He can move a teacup perhaps half an inch. He can attempt to type, but it’s like Archie in Archie & Mehitabel; Isaac asked Trevor to look him up on the Internet. (Isaac is jealous of Alexander Hamilton, his rival in life, and now the hero of a Broadway musical and a portrait on paper money, whilst he is literally a footnote to history.)
Pete, the Scoutmaster with an arrow through his neck, attempts to be the voice of reason. He is a male Pollyanna. He wants to know the Mets scores for the past few years.
The actor who plays Jay is of Indian-from-India heritage, so I am half-expecting a future episode where they make some joke about Sasappis and Jay both being Indian. Utkarsh Ambudkar is also a singer, well, at least a rapper, so maybe in a future episode he and Alberta will do a duet.
I have one friend who thinks the characters are too stereotyped, but most of the people who’ve seen it agree with me that it’s darned funny and worth watching. I’m told the English original is better, but I haven’t seen it myself yet.
