Little Ghosts

Unlike the output of some comedians and comedy writers who hide behind sarcasm and ironic distance, Julio Torres work typically feels like an exposed nerve (or at least an oft-buried emotion like ennui), dressed up beautifully in the finest materials that can be found in someone’s lucid dreams. Not just any someone, though. Torres has a thing for colors, magical realism, robot helpers, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, sinks with personalities voiced by Emily Blunt. Through his work on Saturday Night Live, the two-season Spanish-language comedy Los Espookys and his film debut Problemista, Torres is the rare artist making pretty accessible waking-life art out of those day and night dreams.

Now comes Fantasmas on HBO, a six-episode semi-fantasy about a young man in a surreal version of New York City trying to acquire a Proof of Existence document in order to find a nice place to live. He also finds an oyster earring and suddenly has a mole on his neck that matches its shape. That’s about the extent of a framing device surrounding vignettes featuring many other performers and in different formats, from sitcom to art-school memory, to staged psychodrama. But mostly funny.

If 2019’s My Favorite Shapes was Julio Torres executing a stand-up comedy special as performance art, Fantasmas is what a sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live looks like if Torres, not Lorne Michaels, is in charge.

As such, it sometimes feels as if Torres, who writes, directs and appears in all the episodes, is a guest star on his own series. He generously cedes large chunks of time to guest stars including Emma Stone, Steve Buscemi, Bowen Yang, and Paul Dano to tell stories how the letter Q (Buscemi) is a misunderstood punk who should come later in the alphabet, or how a poor customer service can be a kink in a sketch starring Ziwe and Alexa Demie.

The piece featuring Dano, MELF, is a sitcom-within-the-series about an alien puppet not unlike ALF who instead of just ingesting cats and making wisecracks falls in love with the father of the family (“Melf doesn’t want to be on the side”), leading to a bitter divorce and a flash forward to the long-term effects their affair.

Is it funny, though? Sometimes so, and not just because the premises are novel. These are often A-list actors or New York comedy giants throwing their emotional all into silly bits that carry the empathy and light pathos marking most of Torres’ work. This is the guy who bristled at Papyrus as the font choice for Avatar, but also wrote about a toy well for sensitive boys to stare into, and who made the excessive hoops immigrants have to jump through to survive accessible in Problemista.

At least in the first few episodes, Fantasmas looks and feels darker, with an ice-cold color palette. It’s not the amiable, loose hang of Los Espookys, and at times the show veers uncomfortably close to creating distance with its artifice (sets and backgrounds staged like plays, a la Wes Anderson) and anti-normie archness. It’s sometimes the type of show that if you met it at a party would ask, “What do you do for a living?” and when you reply, “I work at a bank,” would look you up and down finally sighing, “Cool, that sounds so interesting” and then walk away. This is the first major work Torres has put out without an underdog vibe, despite the main character struggling to navigate city bureaucracies. You get the sense Julio, the character with millions of creative concepts, will be fine no matter what.

Perhaps this is Torres, triumphant in his career, expressing more confidence and acceptance that his ideas (clear-colored Crayolas, emojis meant for more complex emotions) are landing with the right audience, if not all audiences.