‘School Spirits Review: Bland Paramount+ YA Drama May Give You Ghost Fatigue

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If you know me in the real world, you've heard me paraphrase/paraphrase/destroy Samuel Johnson's quote: "[W]hen a man is last in London, he belongs to life." I believe in it.

Let me rephrase the quote, because while Johnson never said, "When [a person] gets tired of spirits, the afterlife gets tired," I'm beginning to believe he was suffering from spiritual exhaustion. Which, in fact, is not the most beloved sequel to Mission: Impossible .

One show that has had the misfortune of causing apathy for this growing scene is Paramount+ 's Haunting of High School . But maybe ABC's mediocre comedy isn't dead yet , or CBS' mini-marathon Ghosts , or last summer's instantly forgettable (but better-than-average) Netflix series Boo, B**** . On television, ghosts solve crimes, write stories, and generally help the living. Trends aside, there are very few reasons why most TV ghosts are ghosts. In particular, what no one else has been able to do, at least not as recently as the Phantasm Peak TV show, is create an aesthetically and spiritually pleasing version of The Greatest.

School Ghosts has sharp dialogue notes, a mystery that isn't easy to solve in at least the first three episodes sent to critics, and a big lead role from Peyton List (not your usual Cobra Kai , "ex- "Mad Men " co-star. . - star). What it can't do is become something different from the aforementioned Netflix mix of Boo, B**** and 13 Reasons Why , a show that lacks literal soul but is reinvigorated with metaphorical spirit. . . After school, especially after death.

Adapted from the upcoming graphic novel by Nate Trinrud and Megan Trinrud, School Spirit begins with the late Maddy De List. Maddie disguises herself for her classmates and her friends Simon (Christian Flores) and Nicole (Kiara Pichardo) become the immediate suspects, even though it's their young son Xavier (Spencer McPherson). inside it. loss.

Maddy doesn't know how she died or where her body is, but she knows she's dead because she finds herself mysteriously crouching in the hallways of Split River High and The Ghosts Are Us. He was immediately told that he could not speak to a living person. If you can't. [Hint: If they couldn't, it wouldn't be much of a show.]

As befits TV territory, the ghosts of the school are stuck in limbo. They died in the school or nearby, maybe that's why they couldn't get out. And they can't change clothes, so they're forever stuck imagining the characters and the time of their death. There's an '80s jock (Milo Manheim Wally), a '50s bad girl who can dress up as a stereotypical beatnik (Sarah Yorkin Rhonda), and a '60s or '70s hippie (Rin Boon). If this concept already sounds like a lot of ghosts , it is.

The ghosts attend daily counseling sessions led by Mr. Martin (Josh Zuckerman) and dream of climbing the ladder one day, though no one fully understands the process. All the symbolism belongs to Maddie's sidekick Charlie (Nick Pugliese), a gay ghost from the 90s who says, "It's just jumping from one prison to another. The only difference is that high school feels like forever." , and now. This is a great idea, over-explained and under-explored.

For some reason, the show doesn't treat it as some sort of existential fantasy. Instead, it's a boring place where everyone gets stuck and mostly reacts with perversion. Surrounded by naked teenagers, they hang out in the locker room showers and spend a lot of time staring into the toilet. As Charlie says, "If you want it to make sense, you can stop. It's not fair." That's not the attitude I want from my supernatural drama, even after the murder.

Is this appropriate for a space built primarily around teenage ghosts? Maybe. Maybe part of me is wondering how recent TV shows about spiritualism have removed all traces of religion? Yes, everything must not be touched by an angel , the whole fraudulent religion, or the second season of the matryoshka doll , which is cleverly covered in Jewish mysticism. There's a long way to go between "fulfillment" and "absolute nothingness" in the afterlife, a concept that is very much tied to belief systems in the real world, but not on TV. And don't even get me started on the visual disorientation and claustrophobia that almost all of this can cause in and around the school scene in The Living and the Dead. .

Conceptually, life after death seems endless and beautiful. The ghosts of the school make him seem small and boring. There are loose ends and motifs that might be worth noting: Charlie's story only touches on the emotional stakes of the show, while Ghost provides "Picnic" with the only real fun, but those things take precedence over Maddie's attempts to cross the line. . Go back around the school and cosmically, face forward, over and over, back to the boiler room.

The central question of the series is who killed Maddie, and despite the character's encyclopedic interest in genre films, he has little ability to play ghost gumbo. I love little show titles like My So-Called Death and Blame Our Wounds. It's pretty hypocritical to make fun of these lyrics, but I wish the pop culture references in the show were something more. Most of the fun stuff in the episode titles centers around the pilot, before the series gets serious about the plot, if not the mythology.

The mystery is fueled by the writers withholding information, which makes no sense, although Patrick Gilmour and Ian Tracy are good as the elderly couple and become anything but a red herring very quickly. That means after three episodes, I don't know who killed Maddie or where her body is, and I can honestly say that means viewers don't have enough clues to speculate.

Maddie isn't a particularly cohesive character, but Leaf gives her a sense of empathy, and Maddie's anger at her situation also gives viewers the freedom to be upset. The only note in Maddie's story is her alcoholic mother, played by Maria Dizzia with an incredible intensity unmatched on the show.

Many secondary roles are interchangeable: many ghosts are similar in purpose and do not have a voice to match their skin or basic descriptions. If we're meant to invest in just one of the relationships on the show, bright or ghostly, romantic or otherwise, I'm still not hooked. There's a certain audacity to a show like this aimed at a younger audience.

Sometimes popular high school genre outfits open the door for more mature shows to do wilder and more creative things. School ghosts , unfortunately, do not allow themselves such liberties.

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