For a series about four friends' informal service that devises surreal scenarios to resolve clients' predicaments, Los Espookys dedicates a fairly small portion of its runtime to scenes in which these friends actively plan their projects. It's an ongoing joke of the show, and one that reveals something thematically significant about the central characters: the minds of the quartet — Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti), Andrés (Julio Torres) and Tati (Ana Fabrega) — don't have to stretch very far to imagine the most unlikely and wildly impractical solutions to the problems they're hired to handle.
In the first season's finale, a doctor has barely finished explaining how he's struggling to treat his patient's insomnia when Andrés interjects, "What if we stage a fake, mundane dream around the patient, so she thinks she's finally asleep, stops stressing about it, and actually falls asleep?" This suggestion isn't presented as an aha moment; Andrés speaks in his characteristically aloof tone, and the doctor responds just as perfunctorily: "Great. That sounds very good."
Los Espookys consistently draws humour out of this uncanny dynamic, in which the absurd is accepted as sensical and can be manipulated to reach desired ends. The team's schemes are executed as effortlessly as they are conceptualized. To fabricate the fake dream, car doors with the design intricacy of a high school play's prop are swiftly slid into the room of the sleepless patient to flank her bed, a steering wheel suspended from the ceiling, and the streets of her childhood neighborhood projected onto the wall before her. "I must be dreaming," she mutters, before yawning and drifting into a slumber.
In the premiere of Los Espookys' second season, we learn that Renaldo is now the one wrestling with insomnia, as he's being haunted by apparitions of a mysteriously murdered beauty pageant queen. When he confides in his friend Pony (Felipe Criado) while attending Pony's sham baby shower at a nightclub — Pony only reveals in the midst of opening gifts that they've ultimately decided not to adopt — Renaldo receives the following words of advice: "You see, at night, our hopes and fears leave our minds and put on little plays in our rooms. You need to be sound asleep, so they can get back into your mind."
This defamiliarizing description of dreams is unmistakably a product of Torres's whimsical perspective. One of the unrealized sketches he pitched while writing for Saturday Night Live from 2016 to 2019 was an "infomercial for a miniature staircase that people can put next to their ears at night, so that their dreams can come out and dance, to prevent headaches." Fortunately, when Fred Armisen had the idea to create a Spanish-language series inspired by the goth culture he had observed on a trip to Mexico City and during the few years he grew up in Brazil, he recruited Torres to help develop it and gave his creative whims a boundless canvas.
What might have been deemed too strange or impractical to pull off at SNL now populates Los Espookys and imbues it with its distinctive charm. With Torres and Fabrega as lead writers, and a host of delightfully eccentric supporting performances from Greta Titelman, River L. Ramirez, Spike Einbinder and Sam Taggart, the show unites some of the New York alt comedy scene's best.
While Renaldo tries to locate the root of his hallucinations, the other protagonists face their own hurdles. Úrsula, roused by the inescapable signs of misogyny rearing across the fictional Latin American country where the show is set, immerses herself in electoral politics by offering counsel to an incompetent candidate. Andrés's storyline continues where it left off last season: exiled from his parents' estate after declining the arranged marriage that would have consolidated his family's chocolate empire with a cookie company, Andrés is now left to his own devices — which amount to little more than a wardrobe of glittery, diaphanous outfits — and the generosity of friends who are willing to host him in their too-humble abodes. Throughout the season's six episodes, he flounders in his attempts at self-sufficiency, clinging to his haughty tendencies while seeking the most expedient route back to the cushion of wealth. Torres plays out-of-touch like a true student of camp, and Fabrega's portrayal of Tati tips just as deftly into soapy melodrama when she starts the season absorbed in the archetype of upper-class trophy wife.
Soon enough, Tati is back to being her regular self — which is to say, being someone without any scrutable identity, who is forever surrendering to the most tedious and demeaning tasks of the gig economy. In this season's first episode, she sits in the back corner of a dark conference room and switches the slides of some guy's pointless presentation whenever she's zapped by a shock collar. The main characters of Los Espookys are ones who could not meaningfully exist as their wayward selves in mainstream society; they understand farce and illusion and trickery and not much else. When they band together, they can leverage those sensibilities to pull off fantastic and compelling feats, turning the tables so that the imagination is placed at the centre.
(Crave)In the first season's finale, a doctor has barely finished explaining how he's struggling to treat his patient's insomnia when Andrés interjects, "What if we stage a fake, mundane dream around the patient, so she thinks she's finally asleep, stops stressing about it, and actually falls asleep?" This suggestion isn't presented as an aha moment; Andrés speaks in his characteristically aloof tone, and the doctor responds just as perfunctorily: "Great. That sounds very good."
Los Espookys consistently draws humour out of this uncanny dynamic, in which the absurd is accepted as sensical and can be manipulated to reach desired ends. The team's schemes are executed as effortlessly as they are conceptualized. To fabricate the fake dream, car doors with the design intricacy of a high school play's prop are swiftly slid into the room of the sleepless patient to flank her bed, a steering wheel suspended from the ceiling, and the streets of her childhood neighborhood projected onto the wall before her. "I must be dreaming," she mutters, before yawning and drifting into a slumber.
In the premiere of Los Espookys' second season, we learn that Renaldo is now the one wrestling with insomnia, as he's being haunted by apparitions of a mysteriously murdered beauty pageant queen. When he confides in his friend Pony (Felipe Criado) while attending Pony's sham baby shower at a nightclub — Pony only reveals in the midst of opening gifts that they've ultimately decided not to adopt — Renaldo receives the following words of advice: "You see, at night, our hopes and fears leave our minds and put on little plays in our rooms. You need to be sound asleep, so they can get back into your mind."
This defamiliarizing description of dreams is unmistakably a product of Torres's whimsical perspective. One of the unrealized sketches he pitched while writing for Saturday Night Live from 2016 to 2019 was an "infomercial for a miniature staircase that people can put next to their ears at night, so that their dreams can come out and dance, to prevent headaches." Fortunately, when Fred Armisen had the idea to create a Spanish-language series inspired by the goth culture he had observed on a trip to Mexico City and during the few years he grew up in Brazil, he recruited Torres to help develop it and gave his creative whims a boundless canvas.
What might have been deemed too strange or impractical to pull off at SNL now populates Los Espookys and imbues it with its distinctive charm. With Torres and Fabrega as lead writers, and a host of delightfully eccentric supporting performances from Greta Titelman, River L. Ramirez, Spike Einbinder and Sam Taggart, the show unites some of the New York alt comedy scene's best.
While Renaldo tries to locate the root of his hallucinations, the other protagonists face their own hurdles. Úrsula, roused by the inescapable signs of misogyny rearing across the fictional Latin American country where the show is set, immerses herself in electoral politics by offering counsel to an incompetent candidate. Andrés's storyline continues where it left off last season: exiled from his parents' estate after declining the arranged marriage that would have consolidated his family's chocolate empire with a cookie company, Andrés is now left to his own devices — which amount to little more than a wardrobe of glittery, diaphanous outfits — and the generosity of friends who are willing to host him in their too-humble abodes. Throughout the season's six episodes, he flounders in his attempts at self-sufficiency, clinging to his haughty tendencies while seeking the most expedient route back to the cushion of wealth. Torres plays out-of-touch like a true student of camp, and Fabrega's portrayal of Tati tips just as deftly into soapy melodrama when she starts the season absorbed in the archetype of upper-class trophy wife.
Soon enough, Tati is back to being her regular self — which is to say, being someone without any scrutable identity, who is forever surrendering to the most tedious and demeaning tasks of the gig economy. In this season's first episode, she sits in the back corner of a dark conference room and switches the slides of some guy's pointless presentation whenever she's zapped by a shock collar. The main characters of Los Espookys are ones who could not meaningfully exist as their wayward selves in mainstream society; they understand farce and illusion and trickery and not much else. When they band together, they can leverage those sensibilities to pull off fantastic and compelling feats, turning the tables so that the imagination is placed at the centre.
