Stream It Or Skip It?
We’re going to use this space to extoll the virtues of Will Forte as a cartoon voice actor. He’s one of the stars of the new Netflix series Haunted Hotel, and it’s interesting how, with just a slight enhancement of his speaking rhythm, he automatically makes his characters funny. Here, he plays a ghost that used to own a haunted hotel; now he helps his sister run it , even though he can’t change the channel on the TV anymore.
Opening Shot: A girl is being chased by a drifter with a knife through the darkened halls of a hotel.
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The Gist: When the killer, “Stabby Paul”, catches up with the girl, it turns out that the knife is harmless, because he’s a ghost. This isn’t the first time that Esther (Natalie Palamides) has played with the ghosts that live in the Undervale, a creepy hotel that her mother, Katherine (Eliza Coupe) inherited from her brother Nathan (Will Forte) and is now running.
Katherine lives in the hotel with Esther, her son Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and Abbadon (Jimmi Simpson), a demon who is stuck in the body of a boy from the 1700s. Oh, and Nathan is still haunting the place, helping his sister out and dispensing the knowledge he learned during his time running a hotel full of ghosts and demons.
Katherine’s patience hits its limit when she thinks an actual guest arrived at the hotel, and Nathan, Esther and Ben scramble to find a room without a ghost or tentacled monster in it. Then the guest also ends up being a ghost, the kind who relives his death in a loop. She decides to call an exorcist, something Nathan is adamantly against, given how often they lie about how dangerous ghosts are.
The exorcist (Jenifer Lewis) is really effective, banishing the ghosts to an empty void, but she also unleashes a massive demon (Keith David) that only the ghosts can defeat. In the meantime, Esther encourages the shy Ben to flirt with a flapper ghost who’s been dead for 90 years; she wants to know where her body is buried so she can take the jewels she was buried with, while Abbadon just wants to play with the bones. Ben finds out that he’s a “soul conduit,” which he misinterprets as “true love”, but it comes in handy when his mother needs it.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Haunted Hotel, created by Matt Roller (Dan Harmon is one of the executive producers) feels a lot like an animated take on Ghosts.
Our Take: The first episode of Haunted Hotel manages to cover a lot of ground given it’s only about 25 minutes long. We’re given a glance into the chaos that reigns at the Undervale, and how in over her head Katherine is in trying to coral it all and actually attract human guests. She doesn’t even deal with the blood-dripping mirror in the lobby, which would occupy anyone else who doesn’t have to change the TV channel for ghosts or fight back a kraken.
Given all the craziness and how Nathan just shrugs it all off like it’s normal, we had a nagging feeling that the first show could have been funnier than it was. We had a few mild laughs, but that’s about it. Roller and his writing staff do give the storylines room to breathe, though there are a lot of ghost-related gags, like one dude named Ezekiel exposing himself whenever he gets the chance. So we can give the episode a pass for not making us hold our stomachs with laughter because it was able to establish the relationships and characters.
Coupe plays it straight as the exasperated Katherine, which makes sense given the fact that Forte can’t help but be funny just by slightly exaggerating his natural speaking rhythm. We like Simpson’s faux-menace as Abaddon. But the real key to the series are the siblings, Esther and Ben. Esther is so into this ghost-and-demon dynamic that she’s studied black magic, but Ben is a shy romantic who might relate to the ghosts on a completely human level.
All of this bodes well for the show, as it will succeed on these characters’ personalities more than it will on ghostly gags.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: In the attic, we see a mysterious mirror, that a candle-headed ghost flies out of.
Sleeper Star: Natalie Palamides’ character Esther is the funniest — and toughest! — person living at the Undervale.
Most Pilot-y Line: Katherine calls a meeting to tell the ghosts where they can haunt; she creates a handout that she tries to give to a ghost in a paper bag and tighty-whities, and it falls to the floor. Did she forget they were ghosts?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Haunted Hotel could be funnier, but it’s got fun characters and the capacity to create an infinite number of funny ghosts and monsters to occupy the hotel’s many rooms.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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