When you create a show about a bed and breakfast full of ghosts, you have to get creative as the seasons go on. You have new, eccentric guests come for a visit. You introduce new powers for the ghosts. When the time is right, you even bring on more ghosts to inhabit the space. That, of course, is an honor, I assume. For the last few years, Joe Portman and Joe Wiseman have given us the magical realm of Ghosts, and season three is its strongest yet. How do they do it?
With a cast of this many regulars and so many distinct personalities, one realizes that Ghosts’ biggest assets comes in exploring their history. After three seasons, we have only gone back in a few flashbacks in order to let all of the characters play with one another and to keep it in the present. Port and Wiseman have assembled a merry, but coincidentally dead, troupe of actors whose differences gives them permission to act like crazed Muppets.
Season three may have been Ghosts’ shortest but it also takes the biggest risks. Port and Wiseman describe what it was like to begin the third season with a mystery and then bring in Pete’s wife, Carol (Caroline Aaron?!), as Woodstone’s newest addition. We then dive into “Holes Are Bad,” a series high episode that gives us some dramatic heft like we’ve never seen before.
Someone once said that the world was for the living, and I would say they are dead wrong. It belongs to the ghosts.
Ghosts is streaming now on Paramount+.
