Haunted Hotel

From one of the minds behind Rick and Morty, Netflix’s new animated comedy Haunted Hotel is the perfect mix of fun and creepy to kick off spooky season. Will Forte voices a ghost who previously ran the Undervale, a very, very haunted old hotel. The show follows his attempts to show his family the ropes, vis a vis ghosts, demons, bleeding mirrors, and possession. To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy. http://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  In Netflix's new animated comedy Haunted Hotel, you get a lot of fast, funny jokes. You get terrific voice acting from Eliza Coop and Will Forte. And you get a setting, a massive old hotel, that's just the right mix of fun and creepy. Also, not for nothing, you get some actual lore to make sense of it all, which is helpful because there's a lot of ghosts in the hotel, each with their own shtick, and things get pretty wild. I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about Haunted Hotel on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  This message comes from Midi Health. Most women never get real answers about their hormonal health. Midi is changing that with virtual care covered by most major insurances. Understand your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. This message comes from Scholastic with Licorice, the highly anticipated, chilling, yet heartfelt story from award-winning author Carol LaRoe. Told in powerful prose and illuminating illustrations, this charming tale, following Kitty's eerie journey to find the perfect home, is catnip for fans of Catherine Applegate and Kate de Camillo. Licorice from Carol LaRoe is available now wherever books are sold.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Joining me today is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Welcome back, Walter.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Hey, great to be here.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Always good to have you. Also with us is Jeff Yang. He's a cultural critic and author of The Golden Screen, the movies that made Asian America. Hey, Jeff.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Hey, always great to talk to you, Glenn.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Always great to have you to talk to. In Haunted Hotel, Eliza Coop plays Catherine. She moves into the Undervale, a very haunted old hotel with her family. There's her son Ben, a hapless teen voiced by Skylar Gesando, and her daughter Esther, a practitioner of black magic who's more than a match for anything the hotel can throw at them. Mostly, she's voiced by Natalie Palamides. Catherine's dead brother Nathan is around to show them the ropes vis a vis ghosts and demons and bleeding mirrors and possession, et cetera. That is Will Forte. Also on hand, though much, much less helpful, is Abaddon, a demon trapped in the body of a boy from the 1700s. He is voiced with sinister relish by Jimmy Simpson.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Haunted Hotel is streaming on Netflix. Creator Matt Roller has worked on several shows, including Rick and Morty, Jeff. Full disclosure, I love this. Did you love this?

• 2:52Speaker 04

  So I guess I land in this space of it didn't have to be as good as it did, right? That this is a series, it's landing during quote-unquote scary season, it's gonna have some sort of built-in audience. Netflix Animation, I mean, you know, it has a lot of stuff that feels a bit mid, but it also has stuff that kind of lifts the curve. And I think we talked about Exploding Kittens before. Again, that was a series that just, you know, it didn't have to be that great, but it was actually better than I expected. And that's how I feel about this. There are definitely a couple of solid jokes every episode. There's definitely some really fantastic world building, which again was unexpected.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  And just in general, there are things that make it worth watching, but there's also a very strange mix of tones, some choices that feel a little uncomfortable. And at the end of the day, I would say that it's a bit of a watch at your own risk, especially if you're watching it as family viewing. I'm not sure this is necessarily a show I'd want to have like a sub 13 in the co-pilot seat watching with me.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Right. That's interesting. Walter, watch at your own risk, is that where you came down?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think I have that advice for everything. But I would say that there's something about this that I like screen-spawning horror references. I'm a big horror geek. You know, they have cereal, it's called Great Guy cereal, there's a Chucky doll on the front of it, you know, the killer in one of the episodes is wearing the burlap sack from Friday the 13th, Part Two. So there's stuff that I like to say, hey, you know, I'm the guy in the theater that nudges his date and says, hey, look at that, there's this, uh... Andorphan Rush from being the most irritating fan in the audience. That part appeals to me, you know, there's a period part of it that appeals to me. But some of that familiarity, I think drags a little bit for me. Like this feels a lot like Bob's Burgers. That seems to be the template.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  It feels a lot like Great North, you know, all of these great vehicles for our stand up comedians. You know, going all the way back to squiggle vision, right? With Dr. Katz and everything you get.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Stand up comedians that really get to show their stuff. And Will Forte, I think, really does a great job in this series. But I can't overcomb this feeling of familiarity. And once I know that, you know, it's done by one of the guys from Rick and Morty, who also worked at Community, I kind of know what's going on here. And I kind of expect some of that stuff to be happening here, too. And, you know, to Jeff's point, there's certain issues that they bring up. Where suddenly, like in the middle of Community, there'll be the serious episode of Community, where we talk about generational trauma. We talk about real life issues in the middle of all the madness and the slapstickiness. That's fun and great. But then there's this sort of like, let's ground it in. We're actually serious here. We're artist people and Rick and Morty, I think, does that sometimes too, more successfully, I think. But maybe only because Rick and Morty is in its, you know, multiple seasons now.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Maybe we've had time with these characters and, you know, but I feel like a lot of threads are begun in this first season that aren't necessarily satisfied in a way that feels right to me. I may be expecting too much from a first season, but um, yeah, I'm sort of overall on the fence. I'd wait for season three before I say this is successful.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I jumped over the fence. I'm not on the fence. I am with both feet. I really dug this. I hear what you're saying, Jeff. This is better than it has any right to be because I am very hit or miss with adult animated series. But maybe I'm changing or they're changing because I really love Long Story Short and I kind of love this. But I'll be honest, there is a cheat code to my heart and her name is Eliza Coop. I am helpless before her. Her Jane in the great sitcom Happy Endings is a brilliant comic creation I keep returning to because you can watch that character processing what other characters are saying. And you can hear her reaction in her line readings. You hear what she's not saying, what she's holding back. And you say to me, Glenn, what you're talking about dialogue, you're talking about acting. That's what acting is, yes. But there is, I maintain, another dimension to her performance on that show.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And it's all in, appropriate enough for this, in her voice, in her inflection, in her rhythm of her delivery. She makes hundreds of choices. That's what, where she leads, I follow. You get Will Forte. Will Forte playing maybe the most quintessentially Will Forte character. It's possible to be a chipper goofball. I cannot imagine anyone else in that role.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait. That's not a ghost. Was he trying to murder us?

• 7:12Speaker 06

  Technically, yes, but I don't think his heart was in it.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Doesn't that sound like something Will Forte would say? But we also get a lot of lore. Jeff, you mentioned this too. So much lore, world building, as I guess we'd call it, gets crammed into the show. Just in the pilot, the great Jennifer Lewis shows up as an exorcist, which of course, Will Forte's Nathan resents. And then just offhandedly, she drops some truth that turns out to be actually kind of central to the show.

• 7:39Speaker 07

  There's a logic to the supernaturalness feeling. Ghosts have power over demons, demons over humans, and with the proper tools, humans hold dominion over ghosts. Great, it's weird. Rock, paper, scissors. Now let him go. Of course.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of moving parts, but I really felt they all fit together well. Let's talk about the Rick and Morty aspect of it, though. I didn't get that kind of edgelord vibe from this show that I get from Rick and Morty. Does your mileage vary?

• 8:09Speaker 04

  You know, I feel like this in some ways is directly an expression of the prominence of the show, right? If we're talking about, you know, Matt Roller, the creator of the show. He has Rick and Morty in his genes, and that's what they're kind of putting face front here. They're saying this from creators of Rick and Morty, right?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  But he also worked on The Goldbergs, and I think this show really wants to be a happy marriage between FanCom and kind of edgelord-y, you know, techno-anarchic type humor. Except in this case, it would be misto-anarchic, I suppose. And that's where I think some of the tension occurs. I mean, look, I love the voices. I think the voice acting is fantastic. The guests' voices are just, you know,

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  mind blowing. As soon as you hear like Randall Park and Ricky Lindholm and Kumal Nanjani, you instantly know the characters and they're playing both in and out of type in ways that I think are really interesting. And as you mentioned, the lore is great. I mean, I don't think I've seen this particular type of treatment to unpack some of the things that were all sort of like, why is that in ghost movies that blank, blank, blank is the case? Quite as well done as here. And that's the kind of thing which just feels like the kind of insider humor that Walter is referencing. Not so much the Easter eggs, you know, kind of referring to other shows or other movies, but just asking those frequently asked questions in a way that unpacks them in an absurdist and funny fashion. That works for me.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I look at it and I'm like, I'm just kind of train spotting stuff here and I can't help it. You know, I mean, there's the obvious stuff where there's like Donald Sutherland, that someone that looks just like him kind of appears as a teacher, but as a reference, not only the invasion of the body statues that he was in, but to Animal House. And so, you know, I'm just sort of over here, just my endorphins are going nuts. It's like, you know, one of those little games that you play on your phone, you know, just like, here's another 99 cents. It feels really, really good, you know, to do that. And, and so these are like microtransaction things. And, you know, I, I guess when you describe Rick and Morty as edgelords, it's like, that is true, unfortunately. But I don't want to continue to cede ground to edgelords because the reason I love Rick and Morty is that it really gets at existential issues about identity itself and stuff.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  And it seems to predict certain things like the rise of fascism in the world and our country. And it gets so much right. There's so, so many things that it deals with. And I think Haunted Hotel wants a lot of that, too.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  You couldn't find a better cast to do it. I'm with you on that. And, you know, I love that Eliza Coop is given, I think, two full episodes in a 10-episode season, where it's just about her dating life, which is great. And she goes on a date with Randall Park and he's the best kind of awkward and he's not coded to me as-

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Randall Park is always the best kind of awkward. Let's be honest.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  It's an Asian vibe. And I love that none of it is like stereotypically Asian. He's not Long Duck Dong. He's doing something that's really fascinating and human. And I think where the the show soars for me is when it is the most human. And unfortunately, it's good enough at that, and the cast is good enough at that. That when they drop little breadcrumbs about backstories for some of these characters, and then actually kind of deal with the trauma that these kids have gone through with the loss of a father, and these little hints of it that are dropped here. They land maybe harder than they intended them to, that they're not the same kind of jokey as the rest of it. And it kind of knocks me out. It feels like, all right, I'm ready. You know, strap me in. I'm ready to deal with this. You know, Dick Van Patten, tell me the way. But it doesn't stay there, right? And I love the mythos. I love that there's

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Cthulhu in this. I love that. There's so much stuff that I do love about this. And then there's an episode that seems to be dealing with trans issues and male loneliness. You know, why can't I transform? I just want to change and all this stuff. And then they kind of play it off at the end. It's like, no, I didn't mean transform that way. I meant I just needed to, like, wait a minute. Be serious about this stuff. If you're actually going to be a show in 2025, talk about the issues that are big issues and don't hint around them jokey as though they're not getting people killed, or that people wouldn't be watching this and saying, wait a minute, I came here for the Rick and Morty. I'm part of the Edge Lord group with Rick and Morty, and they're actually dealing with my loneliness. And they're dealing with my inability for relationships. But they don't.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I will agree with you that this show isn't always in control of itself. It does raise the issue of, for example, suicide. And it doesn't do it in a sustained enough way that, you know, when you introduce something that big, it's going to hang over the show, and you can't put that back in the box. And so what they're doing is they're raising it to address it more fully, I think, if they get a second season. But in the meantime, we're stuck with it. It's taking the tone of the show, and it's a gravity sink. And the show isn't equipped to handle what it raises in that particular case.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  I think that the being equipped to address some of these sort of deeper moments of human reality. Is a challenge for any show that tries to embrace that surreal anarchy to begin with, right? It's sort of like, we're not going to take anything seriously. But at the same time, we also want to have you feel like we're being honest and serious and authentic enough to address some stuff, which frankly is a big enough issue to some viewers, that this is what I was talking about, of like, not being entirely certain if many parents will feel comfortable sitting next to their kids and having them exposed to certain things in this show, ideas in the show, issues addressed and confronted through this medium.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I mean, it does bill itself as an adult animated series, which is, you know, this is what makes it sound a lot spicier than it turns out to be. But, you know, at the same time, it's about big scary monsters. So we're stretching that definition of adult. I did want to talk about some of the rest of this cast because everybody's so good. Skylar Gesando plays a similar role here than he did in the Santa Clarita Diet back in the day. He plays this hapless kid who's surrounded by dark stuff, who just keeps his head up.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  I'll have to figure out what to wear.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  Okay, the blue dress you wore when we had the consult with that children's therapist, the brown boots you wore when Abaddon fell out of the car, and the jacket I told you made me see my mom as a woman.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  I notice.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  He's made for roles like that, right? I don't always buy him when he does his slick jerk roles like he was in Licorice Pizza. But as a nerdy kid who completely owns himself, who knows himself, I kind of love him here.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, when you talk about Eliza Coop as your North Star, Skylar Gesando in many ways is mine. I really adore him. I love his timing, his delivery. I thought he was a really funny choice to be Jimmy Olsen in Superman, the kid that doesn't realize how hot he is. There's something really funny about that and really wise about casting Skylar, I think. Yeah, every line delivery is gold for me. There's an episode just devoted to him, splitting into different personality parts of him, including one that's hyperconfident and one that's super horny and one that's a cat, I think.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  And a dad. That was a hilarious beat to like have one of them be just. Dad.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  You know, there's so many good moments that are perfect for his sense of timing, perfect for all of these guys, having him play off of Coop, play off of, you know, this cast is just, it's heaven to me. And, you know, to have like, not the limitations of a regular sort of, you know, two camera set sitcom or something is also a blessing. I like to have, you know, the ability to go through dimensions and to fall through spaces and stuff like that. That's fun. And I think these guys are agile enough as voice actors to handle that.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  I want to send some props to Natalie Palamides, because I really do think the sibling dynamic is just completely nailed in this show between Ben and Esther. And a lot of it is, she has to carry extra weight because she's in many cases, you know, kind of like the Deus Ex diabolus, right, of a lot of these episodes. And also, let's throw some props also to Jimmy Simpson as Abaddon.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  He's basically doing, you know, Stewie from Family Guy.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  But he does it incredibly well. And, I mean, the way that the three of them as mismatched siblings, it's kind of par for the course for adult animation that's around families that you have this particular selection, you know, the naive and then the kind of weird evil one, and then the, the sort of like alien oddball type. But that's true for animation in general. Like Disney movies have to have two mascots, one who can talk, one who can't. That's just a rule now.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting because I think the Esther character, the Natalie Palamides' role, is important to have here because, again, for the world building, right? She is someone who seems to have a handle on things. So we're not worried all the time about this family until things get to be too much for it. Then that's the show queuing you. You need to be worried now. And our friendship with Jimmy Simpson, Abaddon, as you mentioned, is a lot of fun. And as Abaddon, the demon child, Jimmy Simpson is giving it just the right amount of spice. He's going to be the last voice you hear in this clip.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  The point is, I'm starting today by fixing up the honeymoon suite. Soon people will leave here saying, what a great honeymoon we had. And not, I think something bit my leg in the dark.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  You can't read the Yelp reviews.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  And think they'd know.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  OK, come on. Now, A, the Yelp reviews is a good joke. And that button, biting someone's like, this is what I like. This is why I, for example, am all in on this series.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  I'm haunted by one of those throwaway lines, though. There's a scene where Ben, the Skylar Gisano character, is having ghost sex with his ghost girlfriend. And they're writhing around on the floor. And Abaddon says, I know nine easier ways to get bones. And I'm haunted because I could only come up with five. So, yeah, so I'm waiting for season two to find the other four.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  OK, well, that is Haunted Hotel. We liked it. Some of us have issues with it. But I think we all would recommend at least checking it out. We want to know what you think when you do. Find us at facebook.com/PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Walter Chow, Jeff Yang, thank you so much for being here.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Such a pleasure.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Always the best.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show in public radio. And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free. So please go find out more at plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janey Morris, and Mike Katz, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. And Al Loguim provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.