Describing the premise of Los Espookys, HBO’s wackiest sitcom and its first primarily Spanish-language original series, is easy enough. A ragtag group of friends start a business where they stage fake supernatural events for people who pay them. In the first episode, released three years ago, the team are hired by an older priest losing favour with his congregation to a younger cleric with great hair and glossy lips. He asks Los Espookys to rig up an exorcism to boost his reputation.
That’s the premise of the show. Its sensibility, though, is harder to pin down. The series, which returns for a much-delayed second season this week Sky Atlantic and NOW, is a comedy that exists in an elusive space. Not only because the Latin-American country in which it’s set is unnamed, but because there, the surreal and the mundane sit side-by-side. Although the means that the group use to put on their spooky spectacles are endearingly low budget – a rented costume, some SFX makeup, a smoke machine working overtime– their everyday is infused with real-life strangeness. For example, one of them regularly communicates with a water demon who is obsessed with the 2010 Colin Firth film The King’s Speech. In the second season, the same character asks the moon (personified by Oscar-nominee Yalitza Aparicio wearing a silver sequined jumpsuit) to shine brighter for a minute so he can find his lost earring. When one of their clients gets trapped in an alternate reality after stepping through a mirror, it’s not a question of why there’s an alternate reality but why they bought the wrong type of magic mirror. Moments like this are taken at face value by the audience. Maybe they’re real. Maybe they aren’t. Who cares? You’re having fun.
