HBO cancelled Los Espookys after two seasons. It is devastating but predictable. Los Espookys was much too special to survive for long.
I’ll admit Los Espookys is probably not for everyone. It’s extremely strange. Plot setups are ludicrous, their resolutions even more absurd. Characters are impossibly enigmatic right up until they are intimately familiar. There is no show to compare it to. It won’t take very long for you to know whether it’s your flavor or not. I was hooked about five seconds into the first episode’s horror-themed, electrocumbia-blasting quinceañera.
Here’s the rundown: co-created by comedians Ana Fabrega and Julio Torres and brought to life by SNL alum and (once again useful in this show) ethnic chameleon Fred Armisen, it’s a show about four weirdos (in Mexico City? Mexico Fantasy? Fantasy Latin America? More on that in a moment) who start a group-for-hire to carry out (e)spooky, magical, extraterrestrial, terrifying and wacky stunts for a price. They rig up a real life “survive a night in a haunted mansion to inherit a fortune.” They play aliens to get a scientist out of a jam. They dress up as ghosts to help an unorthodox undertaker. They make skeletons queer to validate a goofy archeologist. They perform an exorcism. It’s all B-horror-movie practical effects and lazy acting. They never fail to deliver.
PEAK SUBTITLING
The most glaringly obvious achievement of Los Espookys, something that immediately endeared it to me, is its bilingualism. The entire show is subtitled, the majority Spanish dialogue into English and vice versa. While it was marketed particularly to a Spanish-speaking audience, the meticulous bilingual writing means jokes land in both languages, whether you’re listening to dialogue or reading subtitles.
Subtitles are almost universally bad. Sometimes it’s distractingly obvious, even if you don’t speak the language being translated. Other times, a keen ear can be disappointed by mechanized subtitling failing to capture the subtlety of language. Other times, streaming services botch the display and subtitle delays completely disrupt the experience.
Los Espookys’ subtitling is not a happy accident, as co-creator Fabrega explains in this interview on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn.
“We want it to look funny on screen for people reading it and we also know in the back of our heads how it will sound in Spanish,” she says. The scripts bounced back and forth between English and Spanish as they refined drafts. “We wanna make sure that the phrasing is right but we also wanna make sure when it appears on screen is good...It’s just a matter of tinkering and finding ways that make us laugh when we read it because that’s the way a lot of the audience in the U.S. is gonna be reading it.”
But the subtitling achievement – and my highlighting it at the top – almost makes Los Espookys feel like an “issue” show, like the bilingualism was the point. It was most certainly not. Rather, the subtitling of Los Espookys feels like an indictment of so much other entertainment. Given the millions of English-Spanish speakers in the US plus the millions more across the Americas and world, Los Espookys’ subtitling feels like it should be the norm, not the outlier. Any writer should be preoccupied with translation and subtitling of their work, even though few writers have the chance. That Torres and Fabrega put such emphasis on it is simply a way to appreciate a couple of writers deeply passionate about their craft. They even managed a self-deprecating joke from it in the scene where Armisen’s Tío Tico character, who mostly speaks English, is starting to hang out with the mostly Spanish-speaking Los Espookys crew. He approaches Fabrega’s sweet, dim-witted Tati:
TIO TICO
Tati? English or Spanish, I’m sorry
[Tati, perdón, ¿en inglés o español?]
TATI
Ummm, un poco de ninguno
[Ummm, a little of neither]
WHERE AM I?
Los Espookys is based in Mexico, or at least I thought watching the first season. But I kept waiting on aerial shots of monuments and landscapes telling us we were in Mexico City or Guadalajara or Tijuana. The street-level tracking shots really didn’t feel like Mexico. I was confused but I really resisted reading about the show. I wanted to process it in a vacuum.
As Fabrega explained in the aforementioned interview, Armisen initially pitched the show to HBO as “a group of horror makeup enthusiasts in Mexico City.” (My lord, Armisen must be one hell of a pitchman. That or Portlandia gained him infinite blank checks.) Neither Fabrega nor Torres has Mexican heritage. Febrega grew up in Arizona with Panamanian parents. Torres was born in San Salvador. They met in comedy in New York. The show was shot in Chile. In the end, they managed to make a show that feels both cozily Mexican and something else entirely.
Mexico is unmissable in the show’s stars Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco) and Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti). Ursula’s drab godin job, her foul mouth, her hueva with all the idiots around her; you can just picture her sneering at all the remote workers descending on Mexico City right now. Renaldo – his fashion an unknowable brew of goth, metal, and steampunk – is as chilango as they come. Everybody is wey. Everything is chido. Every question and request, no matter how absurd, gets a simón. Everyone, even the most condescending, get a smile from him. He has the easy, welcoming warmth of so many dudes you could come across in Mexico City. Los Espookys only exists as a crew because he is believably the best friend to three people as idiosyncratic as Andrés, Úrsula and Tati.
Los Espookys’ adventures take them to clueless US Ambassadors; mildewy telenovelas stars; a disgusting, sexist president; the grotesquely rich upper class; and a sexy, sensationalist TV news anchor. Each of these elements screamed Mexico. But colored with a different accent and slang – Renaldo calling everyone parce, let’s say – Los Espookys could have set itself in Colombia. Or Panama. Or Chile. It chose all of them.
As the show moved forward and further away from geographical definition, the ambiguity became part of the joke. Late in season two (this isn’t a spoiler), they visualize the concept: Renaldo goes to investigate the mystery behind the Nuestra Belleza Latina pageant and finds all the contestants, dozens of women still wearing their national sashes, living in one big house together. Fabrega and Torres had smashed Latin America into one ephemeral, fluid fantasy land, a feeling more than a place, a daydream where Latin America is Latin America but it also isn’t, you know?
There’s a lot more to say and wonder about Los Espookys. What is Tati’s gazpacho recipe? How does one become a stair model? What exactly is the nature of Andrés’ relationship with The Moon (yes, the celestial body, played delightfully by Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio)? Where will Ambassador Melanie Gibbons go next? What is Renaldo’s sexuality? Why isn’t Oliver Twix part of Los Espookys? Each new character and setting was an expansive world unto itself, ripe for exploration. We only got a glimpse.
But really, it’s a miracle this show exists at all. We can at least appreciate HBO for getting out of Fabrega and Torres’ way for 12 episodes. This show did not get notes from the suits.
So go enjoy it for the first time or the fifth. If you don’t speak Spanish, I can’t think of a better way to practice it. If you have an idea in your head no one has ever thought of before, I can’t think of a better place to be inspired.