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2 hours ago
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Animated comedy for adults should be a limitless playground for the world’s brightest comic imaginations and sometimes it is, but it is also a genre that has been bloated by bland, empty calories – inessential shows that viewers leave running in the background while they potter or doomscroll. To the teetering pile of landfill entertainment can be added Haunted Hotel, Netflix’s new comedy about, unsurprisingly, a haunted hotel.
As you ponder whether or not to put it on your watchlist, push the giants of cartoon sitcom out of your mind: showrunner Matt Roller has episodes of Rick and Morty on his CV, but Haunted Hotel doesn’t have the fizzing imaginative leaps of that series, nor does it deliver the finely honed, classic comedy of The Simpsons, the lewd snark of Family Guy or the black profundity of BoJack Horseman. Instead, it is, at best, quite funny. It has lines that conform to the familiar shape of jokes. Some of the synapses you associate with laughter will experience mild stimulus. If you don’t like this gag, another will be along in a minute, and although you probably also won’t like that one, you won’t strongly dislike it either. This show is relentlessly, endlessly OK.
Our setting is the Undervale hotel, which suffers from a poor location, terrible decor and a lack of professional staff, but that’s not why it has very few guests. It’s haunted! It is crawling with ghosts, ghouls, demons and spooky supernatural phenomena. At first, it seems we are in a Ghosts rip-off, as the resident spirits offer an unpredictable blend of assistance and hindrance, and bargain pathetically for perks: just as in Ghosts, the boredom of eternity has caused an obsession with asking humans to leave their televisions switched on.
Grappling with the undead residents is a pretty conventional sitcom family unit, led by smart, put-upon single mother Katherine (Eliza Coupe) and ineffectual dreamer Nathan (Will Forte). The twist here is that classic comedy dad Nathan is Katherine’s brother, not her partner, and he is also a ghost, albeit one who thinks and talks like a living human. He and Katherine act as parents to her two kids Ben (Skyler Gisondo), a 13-year-old at the wrong end of the high school coolness spectrum, and little sister Esther (Natalie Palamides), who like a lot of sitcom little sisters has a dark energy that tends towards megalomania. Completing the lineup is diminutive agent of chaos Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson), a demon trapped in the body of a small boy from the 18th century – and if that sounds like an original creation, rest assured that Abaddon is essentially Stewie from Family Guy: “The night is my canvas and terror my paint! I’d like PB&J for lunch.”
Possibly a pilot episode was made and deemed to be too Ghosts-influenced because, once episode one has given us the setup, Haunted Hotel widens out to become a vehicle for various spoofs and homages. There is an episode with a serial killer that references Halloween and other teen-slasher movies, and another involving Esther’s attempts to gain popularity at school by lending out weird creatures as pets, which causes an Invasion of the Body Snatchers situation. Katherine’s effort to leave the madness behind and finally go out on a date, only for her passion to be thwarted by a particularly tumultuous evening developing back at home, is a standard sitcom story.
None of this is actively preventing Haunted Hotel from fashioning sharp jokes. But it’s a format that lends itself more to dialogue that doesn’t feel like it has been worked on for too long, from the time Ben is attacked by a monster and thinks he is about to die (“Don’t let Mom open my laptop! Just throw it away!”) to the moment where Abaddon reminisces about his previous life as the gatekeeper to the fifth circle of hell (“I determined who would enter for torture, and who would fall into the abyss for different torture”). Often the will-this-do? vibe is too strong, as when someone says “You can’t rush love” and Nathan replies: “Or deep-dish pizza – it usually takes 40 minutes!” Eh?
The hotel’s phantasmagorical squatters provide infinite opportunities for throwaway visual gags but, perhaps because writing on such a wide canvas is difficult as it means conjuring humour out of thin air, these never land either. A mouse, cat, dog and dog warden suddenly run across a corridor, prompting Katherine to wonder how they all died together. “Cliff,” explains Esther. “It was foggy!” Meh.
“Welcome to The Undervale!” says Nathan to one potential guest when they walk through the front door. “We know about the smell, and we’re trying.” Haunted Hotel isn’t trying hard enough.
