Ghosts

The Waiting Room at the End of the World

I’ve never been especially trusting of American remakes of British television. U.S. networks have a long habit of taking something dry and sharp from overseas, sanding away the thorns, and replacing them with sentiment broad enough to survive ad breaks. So when CBS announced its version of the BBC’s *Ghosts*, I expected a mess. The setup is fragile enough on its own: a young couple inherits a run-down estate where the dead from different centuries are still hanging around. Mishandle the tone and you’ve just made another supernatural roommate sitcom.

But the American *Ghosts* pulls off a slyer trick than that. It keeps the high-concept skeleton and then fills it in with something smaller, warmer, and much more everyday.



The rules arrive early and stay pleasingly firm. Samantha (Rose McIver) falls down the stairs, flatlines briefly, and wakes up able to see every ghost in the house. Her husband Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) remains completely shut out. That setup could have become a one-joke machine fast, but McIver gives Sam a real sense of physical strain. Watch her in a room with Jay: eyes flicking to invisible interruptions, neck turning every few seconds, posture held just a touch too tight. She moves like someone working customer service on the worst shift imaginable, except the queue of complaints is dead and apparently endless.

The smart move the series makes is refusing to treat the ghosts as grand spiritual mystery. They’re not here to terrify the living. Mostly, they irritate them. The afterlife in this show is less heaven-or-hell than permanent communal waiting room, the kind where you are trapped forever with whoever happened to expire nearby.



The ensemble clicks because each spirit arrives with a full set of historical hang-ups. Brandon Scott Jones is especially good as Captain Isaac Higgintoot, a Revolutionary War officer so tightly wound he seems permanently starched. Isaac’s buried resentment, his centuries-long grudge against Alexander Hamilton, and his painfully delayed path toward accepting his sexuality all play better because Jones refuses to rush any of it. Eternity gives you time to be avoidant. There’s also a wonderfully awkward scene where Isaac and Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky), the manor’s Gilded Age grande dame, experiment with physical closeness on a bed. Since ghosts can’t actually affect objects, the actors had to choreograph themselves so the mattress never dips. The result is bizarre, stilted, and extremely funny. As Kayleigh Dray wrote for the *AV Club*, the series “remains every bit as comforting as it ever was,” and that comfort really does come from how seriously it treats these absurd little embarrassments.

Network-TV pacing still brings its usual headaches. Sometimes the subplots crowd together, and an emotional beat gets hustled offstage because a commercial break is looming. I’ve definitely wanted the show to sit in silence for just a few more seconds here and there.



But *Ghosts* works because it understands what proximity does to people. Or spirits. A Viking, a jazz singer, a Wall Street bro from the 1990s, and a relentlessly upbeat scout leader should have nothing to say to each other. Instead they bicker over TV, nurse petty grievances from centuries ago, and slowly become family through sheer repetition. That’s the show’s quiet little insight. The afterlife here isn’t reward or punishment. It’s just more existence, and you still have to figure out how to share it with other people.