Midway via HBO’s new six-episode collection Fantasmas, an entrepreneur named Denise explains the very explicit service she offers: dressing up bathrooms in costumes. “It breaks my coronary heart to see them bare, undignified, shivering within the chilly as they swallow our day by day filth,” proclaims the girl, performed by the Saturday Night time Dwell 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 value.
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 recognized for masterminding a few of SNL’s most surreal sketches, reminiscent of “Papyrus” and “Wells for Boys,” the half-hour collection 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 way in which, he drifts into situations that appear to have no bearing on his quest however nonetheless include layers of profundity. Denise’s industrial, as an 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 take a seat via. Julio couldn’t look away, and Fantasmas is equally mesmerizing. The present’s incongruous sketches seize the preposterousness of attempting to exist as a person untethered from company entities, private branding, and the abyss that’s in the present day’s web. It’s not precisely humorous, nevertheless it is fully relatable.
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To anybody aware of Torres’s work, together with his current movie, Problemista, and the pleasant comedy collection Los Espookys, these themes could not appear new. Torres usually makes use of audacious visuals to interrogate the logic of residing 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, nicely, human.
However even in contrast with Torres’s different tasks, Fantasmas is uniquely confounding. Its narrative, for starters, is sort of shapeless. Julio’s misplaced earring provides the lightest of plot anchors, leaving Fantasmas liable to tangents about no matter’s been on Torres’s thoughts: the flawed U.S. health-care system, the influencer financial system, The Gown (you recognize, the one which’s white and gold). Valuable display time will get spent exploring, say, a robotic’s try to interrupt into performing or a vicious authorized battle between considered 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 industrial. A community govt encourages Julio to write down 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 purported to make hire? He doesn’t even have the brand new identification doc known as the “proof of existence.”
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As all the time with Torres’s work, there’s loads of cheerful whimsy in Fantasmas. Tilda Swinton voices the ingredient of water. Steve Buscemi performs the letter Q. However the present’s most spectacular flourish is the way in which it evokes puppet theater: The actors roam units that look unfinished, the digicam often tracks them from a fowl’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 probably the very best 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 e-book. (Oh, the Sponsored Content material You’ll Make!)
The phrase fantasmas, Julio explains early within the collection, means “ghosts” in Spanish. It’s what he desires 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 function. If his different current work has include a noticeable melancholy amid the surrealism, Fantasmas provides pure, playful glee. To some viewers, there could also be no use for a transparent crayon. However others might even see what Julio sees: that it’s yet another approach to flip what’s irritating about this world into one thing extra enjoyable.
