'Fantasmas' Dreams In Sketch Comedy

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 11, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 11, 2024 |

There was a moment in the first episode of Julio Torres’ new surreal delight Fantasmas that won me over entirely. Torres enters a Chester (think Lyft but driven by a twink with amazing hair named Chester) and sees a screen strapped onto the back of the driver’s seat where an episode of Melf is playing. At first, it seems like a fun aside in which Paul Dano and Sunita Mani play the parents of a sitcom family in an Alf parody in which the puppet alien Melf joins the family and munches on spaghetti with cookies. But when the jaunty jingle of the opening credits ends, the viewers stay in this reality for a while longer. We watch a growing rift form in the family as Melf and Paul Dano realize a mutual attraction and then act on it, breaking the family apart. When I saw Melf comforting one of Dano’s children after an argument, I realized I never wanted this sketch to end. I wanted to keep diving in through the layers of the premise and see what other turns Torres might have in store. It started as a cutaway gag and I was suddenly in the middle of a marital drama inside an 80s gimmick sitcom, and I couldn’t have been happier. Julio Torres has returned and brought a perfect parfait of delicious dreams.

Fantasmas, the new series from Torres now streaming on Max, exists in a similar tone to another wonderful oddity of his, Los Espookys; fever dreams gently cradled with empathy and magical realism. There’s a plot in Fantasmas, but it functions more as the thread connecting otherwise disparate sketches that spin off from whatever happens. The show runs on Torres’ signature blend of sharp satire, committed absurdism, and dream logic, which makes it feel as if we’ve been treated to a long, meandering stroll through a city we all collectively dreamed into existence. I never wanted to leave it. Each little sketch we saw felt like a nook or cranny of this gonzo little world, showing a slice of life for other denizens of Torres’s dream metropolis.

We first find Torres taking a meeting in the darkly lit offices of Crayola where people sit at desks mounded with pigments and answer phones to speak about colors. He pitches a new clear Crayon, which Crayola is potentially interested in, but they have notes about the name. “Why Fantasmas?” asks a Crayola executive. “Why not Fantasma? It’s not like the red Crayon is called ‘reds.’” The title card wavers between the singular and plural, a lean upon the fourth wall. Later, Torres is enthralled by a seemingly magic oyster-shaped earring that he simply must buy. It’s when he takes his earring out on the town with his dramatic best friend/”manager” Vanessja* (visual and performance artist Martine Gutierrez) that he loses it. As he looks for the earring, he meets different people who we occasionally follow into sketches with their own distinctive styles.

One such sketch follows a young teacher as she investigates boys’ bathroom graffiti in a school that’s very obviously a set with visible scaffolding and the void of a sound stage at the edge of the frame. The acting in that sketch became broad in the specific tenor of an afterschool special and the juxtaposition of the kitschy television aesthetic with the aggressively artificial sound stage setting felt inventive and daring. The same could go for the sketch featuring Steve Busciemi in which we see the alphabet reimagined as a hierarchy of artists with some letters considered more mainstream and others more avant-grade. It called to mind Torres’ comedy special My Favorite Shapes in which the comic imbued different inanimate objects with personalities, histories, and emotional resonance. What Torres offers is beyond a profusion of the strange; it’s also a deep and thoughtful commitment to the bit. For as many dreamy flourishes as Fantasmas has, nothing feels half-baked and you get the impression that if we stayed in any given sketch longer, we would see whole askance worlds that Torres has imagined.

There’s a melancholy that floats through Fantasmas. Torres has a dream about being trapped inside a room with his book-reading machine, and he’s unable to leave due to the tall conical hat he wears bumping into the door-frame. He’s dressed like a wizard in a robe covered in doodles and the people he can see outside wear the same black puffer coat. A puffer coat of his own awaits him outside his door, beckoning him to conform. Outside of his reveries, there’s the pressing issue of “proof of existence,” a sort of ID that proves someone exists and can more easily participate in things like renting an apartment. It’s not entirely clear where this thread is leading just yet, but it reminded me of when Los Espookys would approach issues like conformity, immigration, and queer identity. The approach is elliptical and fleeting, like a glancing blow instead of a direct hit, but it’s an effective way of getting into something without unbalancing the well-managed tone of the series.

It should also be noted that one of the executive producers of Fantasmas is Emma Stone, who continues to lend her star power to today’s weird creators making weird things like this show, but also The Curse with Nathan Fielder and her movies with Yorgos Lanthimos. Obviously, I have no idea if this is true, but in my heart of hearts, I hope Stone and Torres’ connection was formed when they made this Torres-penned sketch for SNL.

Fantasmas is a wonder and a joy to watch. Like all great dreams, it’s best to let it wash over you as a series of singular imaginative visions to enjoy. Though I know it will, I hope the series never ends. Julio Torres is a unique voice and if there’s any justice out there, he’ll be telling us strange tales for a long time to come.

* “The J is silent.” This is the best show ever.