The Unabashed Anti-Comedy of Fantasmas

Midway via HBO’s new six-episode sequence Fantasmas, an entrepreneur named Denise explains the very specific service she supplies: dressing up bathrooms in costumes. “It breaks my coronary heart to see them bare, undignified, shivering within the chilly as they swallow our each day filth,” proclaims the lady, performed by the Saturday Night time Stay alum Aidy Bryant. Like an overeager Vanna White, Denise reveals off a few of her designs: a bedazzled denim set, a silvery sheath, a bright-yellow skirt for a bathroom that’s—sorry, who’s—“daydreaming of a Hawaiian honeymoon with a person she’ll by no means meet.” She then warns viewers to not ask her how a lot her wares price.

The “advert” runs for nearly three minutes. It nonsensically flashes again to Denise’s childhood. It has nothing to do with something within the plot of Fantasmas. It’s foolish and silly and unusual—and I couldn’t cease laughing.

Fantasmas, which premieres Friday,is stuffed with such irresistible detours. Written and directed by the comic Julio Torres, who’s greatest identified for masterminding a few of SNL’s most surreal sketches, similar to “Papyrus” and “Wells for Boys,” the half-hour sequence is Torres’s newest absurdist experiment. He performs a model of himself, an artist additionally named Julio, who’s looking for a treasured earring he misplaced. Alongside the best way, he drifts into eventualities that appear to have no bearing on his quest however nonetheless comprise layers of profundity. Denise’s business, for example, catches Julio’s eye when it performs on a monitor at an web café; by the point it ends, Julio is watching it on his cellphone, suggesting that he sought it out himself—or that it’s simply a part of a stream of ubiquitous, unavoidable promotional #content material everybody has to sit down via. Julio couldn’t look away, and Fantasmas is equally mesmerizing. The present’s incongruous sketches seize the preposterousness of making an attempt to exist as a person untethered from company entities, private branding, and the abyss that’s at this time’s web. It’s not precisely humorous, nevertheless it is totally relatable.

[Read: A movie that understands the absurdity of the American dream]

To anybody accustomed to Torres’s work, together with his current movie, Problemista, and the pleasant comedy sequence Los Espookys, these themes could not appear new. Torres often makes use of audacious visuals to interrogate the logic of dwelling in our late-capitalist period; there’s nothing extra amusing, his tales insist, than being in a world that values firms over individuals, that forces people to endure bureaucratic labyrinths simply to deem themselves, properly, human.

However even in contrast with Torres’s different initiatives, Fantasmas is uniquely confounding. Its narrative, for starters, is sort of shapeless. Julio’s misplaced earring gives the lightest of plot anchors, leaving Fantasmas susceptible to tangents about no matter’s been on Torres’s thoughts: the flawed U.S. health-care system, the influencer financial system, The Gown (, the one which’s white and gold). Treasured display time will get spent exploring, say, a robotic’s try to interrupt into performing or a vicious authorized battle between certainly one of Santa’s overworked elves and his bosses. Some episodes scrutinize Julio’s insistence on prioritizing creativity over consumerism, questioning whether or not his defiance is real or a gimmick. His supervisor, Vanesja (the j is silent, naturally), performed splendidly by the efficiency artist Martine Gutierrez, pushes Julio to star in a credit-card business. A community government encourages Julio to put in writing a script about popping out to his abuela. Julio accepts these requests regardless of his insistence that he received’t commodify his id, as a result of how else is he imagined to make hire? He doesn’t even have the brand new identification doc known as the “proof of existence.”

[Read: The strangely charming world of Los Espookys]

As at all times with Torres’s work, there’s loads of cheerful whimsy in Fantasmas. Tilda Swinton voices the component of water. Steve Buscemi performs the letter Q. However the present’s most spectacular flourish is the best way it evokes puppet theater: The actors roam units that look unfinished, the digicam incessantly tracks them from a chicken’s-eye view, and when Julio thinks, his ideas pop up like silent-film intertitles. Fantasmas is an explosion of Torres’s sensibility, and its aesthetic verve is maybe the perfect and most meta factor about it. He used HBO’s cash—company spoils, if you’ll—to make one thing that doesn’t look made for TV however extra like an unusually pointed Dr. Seuss ebook. (Oh, the Sponsored Content material You’ll Make!)

The phrase fantasmas, Julio explains early within the sequence, means “ghosts” in Spanish. It’s what he needs to name the colour “clear,” a shade he pitches to the crayon firm Crayola. He’s included this joke into his stand-up materials prior to now, however just like the present’s personal ideas, such recycling serves a brand new goal. If his different current work has include a noticeable melancholy amid the surrealism, Fantasmas gives pure, playful glee. To some viewers, there could also be no use for a transparent crayon. However others may even see what Julio sees: that it’s yet one more option to flip what’s irritating about this world into one thing extra enjoyable.