Animated comedy for adults should be a limitless playground for the world\u2019s brightest comic imaginations and sometimes it is, but it is also a genre that has been bloated by bland, empty calories \u2013 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\u2019s new comedy about, unsurprisingly, a haunted hotel.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019t like this gag, another will be along in a minute, and although you probably also won\u2019t like that one, you won\u2019t strongly dislike it either. This show is relentlessly, endlessly OK.<\/p>\n
Our setting is the Undervale hotel, which suffers from a poor location, terrible decor and a lack of professional staff, but that\u2019s not why it has very few guests. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Resident family \u2026 Natalie Palamides as Esther, Skyler Gisondo as Ben, Will Forte as Nathan, Jimmi Simpson as Abaddon and Eliza Coupe as Katherine. Photograph: Netflix\/PA<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u2013 and if that sounds like an original creation, rest assured that Abaddon is essentially Stewie from Family Guy: \u201cThe night is my canvas and terror my paint! I\u2019d like PB&J for lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s attempts to gain popularity at school by lending out weird creatures as pets, which causes an Invasion of the Body Snatchers situation. Katherine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
None of this is actively preventing Haunted Hotel from fashioning sharp jokes. But it\u2019s a format that lends itself more to dialogue that doesn\u2019t 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 (\u201cDon\u2019t let Mom open my laptop! Just throw it away!\u201d) to the moment where Abaddon reminisces about his previous life as the gatekeeper to the fifth circle of hell (\u201cI determined who would enter for torture, and who would fall into the abyss for different torture\u201d). Often the will-this-do? vibe is too strong, as when someone says \u201cYou can\u2019t rush love\u201d and Nathan replies: \u201cOr deep-dish pizza \u2013 it usually takes 40 minutes!\u201d Eh?<\/p>\n
The hotel\u2019s 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. \u201cCliff,\u201d explains Esther. \u201cIt was foggy!\u201d Meh.<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome to The Undervale!\u201d says Nathan to one potential guest when they walk through the front door. \u201cWe know about the smell, and we\u2019re trying.\u201d Haunted Hotel isn\u2019t trying hard enough.<\/p>\n
Haunted Hotel is on Netflix now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Animated comedy for adults should be a limitless playground for the world\u2019s brightest comic imaginations and sometimes it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-31180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}