What makes some souls linger on Earth, long after their mortal lives have ended? According to Netflix’s Haunted Hotel, the new animated comedy from Rick and Morty and Krapopolis creator Matt Roller, it has to do with unfinished business — a lost item never found, a bucket-list item never checked off, an anxiety never quelled.
What makes some shows linger in the mind, long after the end credits have rolled? Here, too, Haunted Hotel furnishes an answer, albeit probably not the one it intends. Despite a solid cast and some decent jokes, the series rarely rises above the level of pleasantly unobjectionable, much less distinctly memorable. Like the spirits that crowd its frames, it’s so wispy that it might go right through you without leaving any impression at all.
Borrowing a premise (as well as a running joke about the dead’s fascination with modern television) from CBS’ Ghosts, Haunted Hotel takes place in … well, you can guess. Katherine (Eliza Coupe) is the semi-reluctant proprietor of the establishment, which is struggling to turn a profit, not least due to the pesky supernatural infestation. On a good day, the Undervale houses maybe two living human guests and at least a couple dozen haunts of all demographics, time periods and modes of death — including the brother Katherine inherited it all from, the cheerfully feckless Nathan (Will Forte).
Katherine is also the frazzled single mother to two kids, hopelessly dorky 13-year-old Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and Machiavellian preteen Esther (Natalie Palamides). Rounding out this offbeat clan is their unofficial “ward,” Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson), a demon imprisoned in the body of a pallid 18th century boy. You can think of him as akin to Stewie from Family Guy or Godcat from Exploding Kittens in his ever-so-quirky combination of outsized arrogance and disarming childishness.
The issue with Haunted Hotel isn’t that it calls all these other shows and references to mind, per se. It’s that having done so, it struggles to carve out any notable identity of its own. It’s sort of funny (and, thankfully, never aggressively unfunny), but vanishingly few of its jokes are snappy enough to remember afterward, much less to repeat here. It’s got a sentimental streak, but wears its emotions so lightly I was caught off guard whenever the characters would begin to talk earnestly about how much they mean to one another.
There’s no bold stylistic flourish to make the visuals stand out; not even the monsters stray very far from the benignly slick, colorful style that will look familiar to anyone who’s seen an adult animated series in the past two decades. There are occasionally intriguing bits of lore (for example, Nathan casually refers to one of his fellow Undervalians as a “death day looper,” which made me curious to learn more about the whys and hows of ghost taxonomy), but the show rarely bothers going any deeper into them (for example, we don’t ever hear about death day loopers again).
What Haunted Hotel does have going for it is a strong cast. No one is straying far outside their usual wheelhouse here, but just because Forte could play “sweetly clueless” in his sleep or Gisondo has done “awkward but ultimately good-hearted nerd” a million times doesn’t mean they’re not playing those parts very capably here. You want to like these characters because you know and like their voices already. (The same goes for a deep bench of guest stars that includes Kumail Nanjiani, Jenifer Lewis and Randall Park.)
But here, too, the show falls a bit short. With the exception of Palamides’ Esther, whose sardonic exterior frequently gives way to a more vulnerable side, none of the core characters are very fleshed out beyond the types they represent. Nor do their relationships have the depth or texture to make us invest in them — not even with Abaddon, whose feelings about the family oscillate between resentful disdain and genuine affection. They seem like a perfectly nice family, but that’s all they are: nice, not complex or vivid or unique.
That doesn’t change even as they’re thrown into situations that sound appropriately outlandish on paper. The premiere involves Katherine hiring an exorcist, and the finale the arrival of a demonic cult; in between are storylines about Ben getting a ghost girlfriend (Riki Lindhome), Esther fashioning herself a zombie dad (a grunting creature named Dan), the local junior high getting overrun by bloodthirsty critters and whatnot. But with few inspired twists or sharp gags or meaningful emotions on offer, most overstay their welcome even at two or three plots per half hour.
There are a few exceptions. One is a bizarre B-plot about Katherine getting courted by her own honeymoon suite, only to see it turn jealous and possessive. Notwithstanding the endless parade of ghosts, demons, serial killers and at least one Mothman, Haunted Hotel is mostly not trying to frighten you. But there’s something genuinely unsettling about watching Katherine get stalked by the bubbles from her bath or the room itself somehow teleport around the hotel; if nothing else, the suite is certainly one of the season’s more unusual villains.
Another is a late-season sequence that, for reasons too spoiler-y to get into here, sees a character time-traveling back and forth across millennia to help someone they care about. It’s one of the few times the love supposedly binding this family is truly shown rather than just talked about as if it were an abstract theory, and I even found myself a bit moved by this grandest of grand gestures.
In both cases, the series feels like it’s finally embracing its full potential by letting itself get a little scary or ugly or sad, rather than sticking with the relentless but textureless cheer that defines most of the rest of its output. Should Netflix decide to check in for another stay, here’s hoping Haunted Hotel lets its freak flag fly in earnest — rather than trying to stuff it down the bottomless pit in the garden, lest it scare off the normie customers.