As CBS’s top comedy, Ghosts — somehow simultaneously a phenomenon and a sleeper hit – returns for its fifth season, showrunners Joe Wiseman and Joe Port joined TV Guide for a look ahead at what to expect from the ethereal sitcom, and they have a handle on just why the series has proven both fresh and funny.
“The secret sauce of this series is our cast,” says Wiseman. “They’re incredible and there’s so many of them. We have 10 regulars and each of them is just a homerun hitter and it gives us so many directions to go. So we are just excited to keep telling stories about our characters and see where it goes.”
Season 5’s first order of business is to resolve last season’s cliffhanger, which saw Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) in a literally existential bind after Elias Woodstone (Matt Walsh), the newly infernal emissary of Hell, tricked him into trading his soul for the success of the B&B. “We love when Jay is able to be centered in a story because obviously he can’t see the ghosts, hear the ghosts, or talk to the ghosts,” says Port. “So it’s very helpful for us when he’s a critical element to an episode because it just involves him and obviously the stakes are very high when it’s literally Jay’s life on the line.”
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Jay’s damnable dilemma is poised to launch the first major signs of strains between the innkeepers and the ectoplasmic occupants of Woodstone B&B. “Jay is in a tough spot and very heavily because none of this would’ve happened had they never met the ghosts,” Port explains. “This season we’re going to see some struggle between Sam and Jay and the ghosts. Sam is a people-pleaser and has put up with a lot, but I think some of the events of the first half of the season are going to push her to the edge of where she’s going to have to take a stand and have some pushback against them.”
The ghosts won’t be the only ones sparking a steady stream of friction with the Arondekars, Port reveals: “This year we’re introducing a new corporate kind of enemy that Sam and Jay are going to have to do battle with.”
But conflict doesn’t completely reign within the country manor. Shippers longing for next steps in the long-simmering romance between Pete (Richie Moriarty) and Alberta (Danielle Pinnock) won’t be disappointed. “That’s been a long-brewing one and Pete’s long expressed interest in Alberta,” offers Port, “and now I think she’s kind of come to the place where she has learned that the kind of guys she was going for in the past weren’t worthy of her love and she’s now seeing Pete in a new light at the end of last season. And we’re going to pick up where we left off with that.”
And Wiseman says PeteBerta won’t be the only ghostly love match brewing. “There’s a very unexpected coupling that is going to happen,” he says. “I can’t give out any spoilers, but later on in the season, it’s a fun thing to do. The ghosts are here forever, they have nothing to do, so it only makes sense that they pair off for either long-term or short-term.”
“They also have limited options,” adds Port. “So I think it makes for extra strange bedfellows sometimes.”
With such a deep bench of increasingly layered characters to draw from, as well as a strong roster of recurring players, the showrunners are grateful that the series’ robust, old school episode count affords them plenty of opportunity to spotlight everybody — but they have some extra special plans ahead for one character in particular. “We’ve been wanting to explore Flower (Sheila Carrasco) and deepening her character a little bit and seeing a smarter side of Flower, so that’s something that we’re jumping into a little bit this season,” he reveals.
“We have 22 episodes to work with and we have eight ghosts, so we try to give each of the main ghosts a couple episodes to highlight them,” Port explains. “But this year I think we want to branch out to and start to investigate some of our ‘side ghosts,’ if you will. We want to learn more about Nancy, Betsy Sodaro’s character, and just continue to build out the world.”
Even past guest stars will get another opportunity to shine, promises Wiseman.
We’re going to see Ben Feldman come back [reprising his Season 4 role as Kyle Rosenblat],” he offers. “He’s been established as the only other living so far that we’ve come across that can speak to ghosts like Sam can. And then in the Christmas special, we’re going to have a very unexpected guest star return.”
“The Christmas double episode is going to be one that’s going to have a lot of both the episodes really affect each other,” teases Port. “I think people will see things when they go back and watch the first one that will be informed by seeing the second one. It’s a little time-bendy.”
First up, however, is the series’ annual tradition of a blowout Halloween episode. “Our philosophy is to go a little bit bigger with our Halloween episode since it’s a supernatural-themed comedy,” says Wiseman. “So we do meet a new type of ghost — or at least a ghost that has been living under conditions that we haven’t seen before.”
In fact, this season the entire holiday season is offering up opportunities to further build out the ever-broadening Ghosts mythology. “In terms of the wider world, Pete obviously can leave the property and we’ve taken some advantage of that, but this year we do our first Thanksgiving episode that we’ve ever done,” reveals Port. “It’s kind of an homage to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which is a favorite of Joe and myself. And so we’re going to see Pete out in the world a lot in that episode.”
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The showrunners admit they love the world-building aspect of the show and the internal logic dictating ghost protocols. “The trick with the rules is you want to be consistent,” says Wiseman. “You don’t want to just completely neglect any of the rules, but trying to look for corner cases where like, ‘Oh, OK, maybe this could happen under these circumstances.’ We’ve done that in the ‘Holes [Are Bad]’ episode, where it’s sort of like, ‘OK, ghosts can go through vertical surfaces but not horizontal, so what happens if they fall in a hole?’ And that was sort of turned into a whole episode. We will be seeing a new type of supernatural ghost-ish power in our Christmas episode.”
Given that Ghosts’ parent network CBS has an established penchant for building franchises — universes encompassing everything from CSI and NCIS to The Big Bang Theory satellites — it’s fair to wonder: Might there be another haunting comedy in the works?
“We’re interested in that!” says Wiseman. “We’re an adaptation of a British show, and so they very smartly have started doing their own Ghosts versions all around the world. I think they’re doing Greece, France, Germany, Australia. Joe and I have nothing to do with that specifically, but we would very much love to expand the Ghosts universe that we’ve been playing in, for sure.”
Until then, the showrunners have another project brewing that fits under the same umbrella as Ghosts. “In the supernatural comedy arena, we’re about to start casting our vampire pilot, called Eternally Yours,” says Port. “It’s going to shoot in the spring right after we finish Season 5 of Ghosts. … It’s not related to Ghosts at all, but we’re excited about it and it’s gonna be a fun thing to cast.”
Ghosts Season 5 premieres Thursday, Oct. 16 at 8:30/7:30c on CBS.
