Fantasmas Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Julio visits Crayola HQ, where different colors are answering customer service calls. He pitches a new clear color, and the execs he’s meeting with wonder what the purpose is. “To color something clear is to acknowledge that things are different, and that’s just fine.” What does he want to call the color? “Fatasmas,” which is “ghosts” in Spanish. An exec convinces him to make it singular: “Fantasma.”
Julio gets into a hired car, driven by a chatty driver named Chester (Tomas Matos). Chester tells Julio to delete all of his car hire apps and just download his; he promises to even come get him if he’s driving someone else.
On the phone mounted in the back seat, a sitcom named MELF is playing; it’s about an alien who crash lands in an earth family’s home. He loves eating cookies and spaghetti for dinner. But the most interesting part is that MELF (Marc Petrocino) and the family’s dad (Paul Dano) are falling in love. He leaves his wife (Sunita Mani) and abandons his children. Hilarious, right?
Chester and Julio pick up Julio’s robot assistant Bibo (Joe Rumrill), who wants time off for a teeth cleaning, even though he’s a robot. Bibo also shows yet another urgent letter from Julio’s landlord, which Julio choses to ignore.
Julio hears a “siren call” in his head, gets out of the car and goes into a jewelry store, where he finds a tiny, oyster-shaped crystal earring. “She said it was part of a cursed antique, so I had to buy it,” he says to his “manager” Vanesja (Martine Gutierrez) at a club. Of course, he then proceeds to lose it.
The two of them share Chester’s car with a teacher (Eudora Peterson), and Julio tells them how he can feel into colors, shapes, sounds, and letters after he was hit by lightning as a kid. For instance, he tells the story of the letter Q (Steve Buscemi), who is too avant-garde and punk to be so early in the alphabet, surrounded by “normies” like P and R.
At her school, the teacher ends up using the boy’s room and is perplexed by a drawing of a penis that is shying away from the viewer. She tries to root out just which boy drew it, finding a bully who gets angry at people who do thinks that he thinks he can’t, like wearing a purple shirt.
As Julio tries to figure out if the birthmark that’s shaped like the oyster pendant he lost is growing, he records his recurring dream, where he wears the pointy hat, for analysis.
The first few minutes of the first episode of Fantasams, which includes Emma Stone as one of its executive producers, along with Torres, is indeed very strange, and we wondered if it was going to just be one of those shows we were just not going to “get”. The minimalists sets, Torres’ positive but vaguely off-putting demeanor, the symbolic representations of things as broad as “New York” and as specific as crayons… it was a lot to take in.
But as we are introduced to the people who are going to populate Julio’s world, and the sketches that further illustrate how Julio thinks and feels, things become a bit easier to digest. Torres aims to be incidentally funny when it comes to the scenes where he interacts with people like Chester and Vanesja (pronounced “Vanessa”) and robots like Bibo, and even the sketches balance the funny with the strange and dramatic.
In the MELF sketch, for instance, Dano’s character has to contend with being estranged from his family due to his choice. Buscemi is pretty funny as the rebellious Q, but he’s also alarmed when W, X, Y and Z rocket to stardom as the back-end weird letters he wanted to be.
Through all of this, Julio keeps looking for this oyster pendant, convinced that if he compares it to his birthmark, which was once exactly the same size, he’ll be able to persuade a doctor that it’s growing and needs attention. So, through the weirdness, Torres knows that a throughline is necessary to keep things anchored to reality, even if it’s only by a micro-thin thread.
Of course, some of the sketches are just absurd, like when Bowen Yang plays a North Pole elf testifying against Santa Claus for not paying his workers, or when Alexa Demie plays a way-too-devoted insurance customer service rep who bucks the system by using her computer for personal purposes and falls under the domineering spell of a different customer service rep (the aforementioned Ziwe) when she herself needs assistance.
But with all of these insights into Torres’ psyche tied together by his search for the pendant, even if it’s an ultimately silly throughline, all of the absurdity and the messaging he tries to convey comes together into a show that’s a thought experiment that delivers laughs just when it seems it’s taking itself too seriously.
