The Ghosts With the Most (Laughs)

In this era of abundant quality TV, the viewer's dilemma is often "which subscription services have the best shows?" What great show are you not watching because it's on a service you don't get? But remember old-fashioned broadcast television? It turns out you can find some good shows there too.

Ghosts is a sitcom on CBS, adapted from a British show of the same name. Couple Sam and Jay inherit an upstate country manor and decide to move there to open a bed and breakfast. But the house is occupied by the spirits of everyone who has ever died on the property -- a random assemblage of big characters who (to borrow a phrase from Quantum Leap) only Sam can see and hear. Hijinks ensue.

One of the strengths of this show was inherited from the British original: its wide range of interesting characters. Though I've never watched an episode of British Ghosts, I've seen a clip or two, and it does seem as though many of the characters were ported over to the U.S. version with few conceptual changes. There's seemingly no shortage of stories to tell when you can just turn to one ghost in particular, who may have decades or even centuries of back story, and simply explore that.

But a unique strength of the U.S. version is how well all these roles were all cast. While the character descriptions largely sound the same in British Ghosts, the creators of this version seem to have instructed their cast to do their own thing and not watch the original. And they found a group of 10 (!) talented comedians without a weak link in the bunch. You'll have your favorites (and I have mine), but there's never a "weak episode of Ghosts" simply for the character it's focused on.

Unsurprisingly, this network show has learned many of the tricks of its streaming relatives. There's plenty of serialized storytelling here: the first season centers on trying to open the bed and breakfast, details we learn about the pasts of the ghosts come back again in later episodes, and (most importantly for a sitcom) a stable of hilarious running jokes accumulates over time.

Yet the show has its other foot in its network roots -- and benefits from this too. Commercials have so overrun the networks that each episode is a brisk 20 minutes that flies by as though "only the good stuff" is left in each episode. The episode cliffhangers (when there are any at all) are light-hearted fun; I smile when I have the opportunity to watch a new Ghosts, rather than feel the need to inject it into my eyeballs before the internet spoils it for me.

And if you've cut the broadcast cord? You can stream Ghosts: it's on Paramount Plus (which basically every Star Trek fan subscribes to, of course).

There are maybe one or two shows branded as sitcoms that I might rate a little bit higher than Ghosts; an episode of Shrinking, for instance, is likely to make me laugh out loud and tug at my heartstrings. But I would honestly say that if you just want to laugh and that's it, you probably can't do better right now than Ghosts. A third season was recently announced for next fall, and I'm thrilled to know it'll stay in my "TV diet" for another year. I give it an A-.