One of the tragedies of having so much fucking TV out there is missing out on all the loveable weirdos that hide out in the shows you don’t watch. Take HBO’s Tati, for example the ghosts. There’s no one like Tati on TV. Fully realized by Comedian and the ghosts Co-creator Ana Fabrega, Tati is a person best described as a living improv comedy sketch. A self-proclaimed entrepreneur, she takes on unusual jobs (like running slideshows for business meetings, except the presenter uses a clicker to do that shocks her so does she know she needs to switch slides?) that somehow work for her (Hollywood producers want her because she writes abridged 10-page versions of classic novels?) but leave her right where she started (her price for the rights to her stories is $8?). There’s just nobody like Tati on TV. She is Schrödinger’s fool, everything and nothing at the same time. In other words, it’s great television.
the ghosts is full of characters like Tati. A surreal comedy about a group of friends who start a business staging “spooks” for people who need them the ghosts Traffic to the absurd. In one episode, a lazy cemetery attendant hires Los Espookys to pose as ghosts who tell grieving family members that their bodies aren’t buried in the wrong graves, they just want to switch places after the burial. In another episode, a woman about to be divorced hires her to punish him by staging a haunting where everyone he sees looks and acts like him so he can see how unhappy she makes him.
Tati is just one member of the eponymous Espookys gang, and all of them are equally adorable. There’s leader Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), a cute guy who loves horror and gets perplexed at the thought of something else. Andrés (Julio Torres) is the heir to a chocolate empire who falls out of favor with his family and struggles to maintain his glamorous lifestyle. And Ursula (Cassandra Ciangherotti) is Tati’s older sister and maybe the only “normal” one in the crew.
In a fictional, unnamed Latin American country, the strange and unusual is normal the spookies, making a character like Tati just the strangest thing in a world full of oddballs. With an environment like this – which began to make sense of the fact that the cast of the mainly Spanish-language comedy were all from different countries and spoke with different accents – the ghosts
In its second season, which ends Friday, Renaldo is haunted by the ghost of a dead beauty queen, a water demon tries to get a job at the US embassy, Andrés dates a wealthy widower and conspires with the moon getting rid of his children and Ursula’s increasing frustration with everyone causes her to stumble into politics.
Mainly though the ghosts is just a very fun celebration of being a weirdo. The gang that Los Espookys forms is a multitude of things: weird, imaginative, deluded, stubborn, nonsensical, and most importantly themselves. There’s no one like them, and every episode I get to hang out with them is one of the best Series I watched this week.