Julio Torres’ ‘Ghosts’ Is a Manifesto for Keeping TV Weird

PQuantity, not quality, defined the Peak TV era, an original content bonanza that began when streaming services began making their own shows in the mid-2010s and was in decline as Americans emerged from pandemic isolation. But the hustle and bustle of production has inevitably facilitated some deeply strange — and often excellent — projects. Netflix let cult comedian Maria Bamford do it Lady Dynamite, a surreal journey into his mental illness. Starz Greenlit New Queer Cinema Legend Gregg Araki Now Apocalypsewhat was like Melrose Place if it had horny lizard aliens. SNL writer Julio Torres sold HBO in Los Espookysa Spanish-language comedy about four friends who make a living by running elaborate horror scams.

Now that Peak TV is gone, the streaming industry is contracting and executives have become increasingly conservative about the projects and voices they choose to invest their dwindling budgets in. And yet, by some miracle, Torres is back on HBO, on June 7th, with his strangest and most wonderful creation to date. Ghosts (Spanish for ghosts) takes its title from a quasi-autobiographical screenplay by writer-director Torres, Julio, who makes Crayola, at the beginning of the six-episode series premiere, a light-colored crayon with that spectral name. But this applies equally to the series’ characters, eccentric dreamers adrift in a society eager to commodify their identities and aspirations. The premise does Ghosts at once a shining specimen of weird TV and a manifesto arguing for the existence of this possibly dying art.

Here’s the best I can do for you in terms of plot summary: Julio, a New Yorker who has been avoiding urgent letters from his landlord, buys and immediately loses a precious gold oyster earring that is the exact size and shape of a worrying earring. wart on the side of the face. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the series follows her search for the missing trinket, with the dubious help of her agent, Vanesja de Martine Gutierrez (the s is silent, and Vanesja’s career is actually a years-long performance art project) and the robot secretary, Bibo (voiced by Joe Rumrill), who is also an aspiring actor. Julio’s profession is nebulously creative. As a result of being struck by lightning as a child, he explains, “I can feel the inner life of shapes, colors, sounds and letters.” For example, Q, “which appears very early in the alphabet” and “should be well behind the other avant-garde letters: X, Y, Z”.

This monologue, delivered in the back of a Chester – which is like an Uber, except its eponymous driver (Tomás Matos) is an eccentric genderqueer who resists corporate domination – gives rise to what, in a more typical form, SNL-adjacent comedy, can be described as a sketch. Steve Buscemi appears as Q, an aggressive, experimental punk musician who is signed up to a project between the accessible and crowd-pleasing normies P and R. The public revolts. Q spirals into self-destruction. But then weirdness triumphs when a band made up of W, X, Y and Z rises to fame and cites Q as a seminal influence. What appears to be a fanciful digression is actually Ghosts in miniature: the journey of an eccentric hero who illustrates the cultural value of the brilliant bohemian.

These vignettes are the essence of the show, held together by the connective tissue of Julio’s quest. Set in a New York whose visuals are equal parts Blade runner, diorama art and neon dreamscape, with Torres frequently zooming out to expose the construction of the sets, these stories take us on side missions with secondary characters. Unwaveringly loyal to her employer, an insurance agency employee (Alexa Demie) who refuses to process Julio’s claim meets her sadomasochistic match in an airline customer service representative, played by Ziwe. Ghosts is full of wacky TV parodies, from Bowen Yang as an elf suing Santa for unpaid work to an alternate universe Alpha to a mind-blowing message from Real Housewives starring Rachel Dratch, Rosie Perez, Cole Escola and Emma Stone (executive producer) in a Lisa Rinna wig. As you can see, guest stars range from Hollywood celebrities to underground icons: Julia Fox, Paul Dano, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Sedaris, Pose featured Dominique Jackson. Tilda Swinton, who starred in Torres’ recent film Problemistgives voice to a majestic bathroom.

As Problemistwhich applied its creator’s fantastic vision to the labyrinth of immigration and the gig economy that sucks in the young, broke and creative, Ghosts is concerned with the bureaucratic apparatus that seeks not only to standardize but also to monetize identity. If the program has a villain, it’s a capitalist surveillance nightmare called Existence Proof – a monolithic new form of identification that collects every imaginable variety of personal data, charges a monthly subscription fee, and is quickly becoming a requirement to get everything, from employment to housing. Julio wants to give up, but the effects on his livelihood could be devastating. His lack of evidence forces him to rush, which could mean dismissing ideas as a tragedy about at that time, a dolphin died in the polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn in favor of autobiographical oppression pornography. “No metaphors”, Vanesja advises her client. “Just big, sad speeches. Call him Gaytino.”

People who loudly identify themselves as queer can be tiring; they are often more affected than genuinely different. But Torres is real – a weird visionary who delivers the artistic, comedic and political potential of external identity. What is he resisting, and through, Ghosts it is the reduction of diversity in art to a few boxes checked on a Proof of Existence request. Of course, he’s a gay Salvadoran whose background has influenced his work. However, it’s not his vital statistics that define his comedy. He’s a mastermind who anthropomorphizes the letter Q and invents “the first and only gay hamster nightclub in New York City” and longs for “an emoji that’s one of the spoons of Beauty and the Beast finally becoming human again, but then realizing he’s still a servant” (as Julio explains: “That’s for when you get a promotion at work”).

Representation matters is the insensitive refrain of the idiots who urge Julio to abandon his crazy flights of fancy and just do Gaytino already. It certainly happens, as TV moves away from the Bamfords and Arakis it briefly embraced, but not necessarily in the way they mean it.