Plenty of new comedies aim for originality, but few reach the heights of individuality that the charming Los Espookys (Sky Comedy) does in its debut. This Spanish-language series is an HBO import which feels quite unlike anything else on television, and it inhabits its own oddball skin so easily that it takes a moment to realise just how slyly surreal and clever it is.
Essentially, it is a workplace comedy, but when that workplace involves using ropes and lighting tricks to spin a “possessed” young girl in midair as she projectile vomits all over a charismatic young priest, you know this is not going to be about hiding staplers in jelly or photocopying one’s body parts. Los Espookys are a group of four goth-adjacent friends who specialise in staging horror scenes. After organising a gruesome quinceañera, where they turn a cake into a rotting mound of flesh, they soon realise there is a market for “dark parties”, and they find a keen selection of people who wish to make any given ordinary scenario into a deeply creepy one.
The first episode makes light work of introducing the characters, and simply gets on with the job, which makes it feel pacy and fresh. Ringleader Renaldo delights in his nascent horror business. His best friend Andrés is the blue-haired, adopted son of a wealthy chocolate magnate, Úrsula is a dentist’s assistant, the brains of the operation and a dab hand at prosthesis, and Tati completes the quartet as the ditsy one, who licks soap to test it and wears in other people’s shoes for money. She has the makings of a classic character already; her otherworldliness suits this strange reality perfectly.
Though filmed in Santiago, it is set in an unnamed country in South America, and when the local, long-established priest decides he would like the limelight back from the “pious, young and hot” Father Antonio, he decides to stage an exorcism, with the help of Los Espookys. As plots go, it’s relatively straightforward. But every time it steps towards any danger of fulfilling expectations, it veers off in a curious new direction. Done badly, it could have ended up as the dreaded “quirky” comedy, but it is handled with such casual aplomb that it is simply delightful. Andrés has a standoff with the local dentist over a threat to make the family’s confectionery sugar-free. Portlandia and Saturday Night Live star Fred Armisen is Uncle Tico, a parking aficionado who is living his lifelong dream of parking cars at the airport. (There is a beautiful explanation, in the briefest of flashbacks, of his fondness for parking, and a demonstration of his skills.)
There are hints at a twilight reality beneath the practical business of all these spectral special effects. Gregoria Santos is a local television host who specialises in the supernatural, but appears to be in a semi-catatonic state under the control of her handlers; when she and Uncle Tico meet at a birthday party for Charles Boingo, the founder of airport free-internet provider Boingo (of course), it suggests more bizarre adventures are in store for our protagonists. To say Los Espookys is easy to watch might sound like damning it with faint praise, but it takes serious skill to conjure up a world this strange, and make it look so easy.
