The warm comedy “Ghosts” has been a hit for CBS, despite facing an at-times claustrophobic feeling over the years, perhaps spawned in part by being a show launched during the pandemic. Star Rose McIver, who plays Sam, broke down Season 4’s premiere for TheWrap and teased how this season opens up multiple new pathways for the show to explore and for new characters to enter its orbit.
The premiere of Patience
That first new pathway comes with the debut of new ghost, Patience, played by comedic actress Mary Holland (“Nightbitch”), in Thursday night’s premiere titled after her character. McIver praised Holland’s season-opening arc playing the traumatized Puritan ghost — but shared that the character had initially left her apprehensive due to an existing “Ghosts” prude.
“I had been a little concerned with potential overlap with her and Hetty as characters, Patience and Hetty being the sort of rule setters of the house,” McIver explained. “But it was incredible to see, when they’re next to each other in the episode, how vastly different their characters are, and how progressive Hetty has become in her own funny way.”
As we saw with the end of the premiere, Patience is set to stick around for a beat — and seems likely to continue to pop up even beyond her initial arc.
“I think we all know Mary is awesome to have around. So I’m sure she’ll be back plenty,” McIver said.
Holland brings experience as a prolific Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre performer. McIver said that she started taking UCB classes herself while working on “Ghosts.”
“She’s able to make a character that could be so finite and at risk of really being dull or being the buzzkill of the party,” McIver shared. “It’s sinister energy, but she’s so energetic and so thoughtful and plays things so many different ways. I mean, in the true improv sense, she really is in the moment.”
Expanding the show
But Patience isn’t the only new character set to help open up the show’s world. Next week’s episode brings the debut of another new character to “Ghosts”: Sam’s dad, played by Dean Norris (“Breaking Bad”).
“It’s notable that we haven’t met him for three full seasons,” McIver noted. “We’ve had multiple Christmases, and there’s never really been mention of him. And so the stakes are very high when he appears,” McIver explained.
“They’re able to kind of reconnect in a way, and that they hadn’t for so long,” McIver shared. “The tough guy exterior with a sensitive heart inside is just always very fascinating to me, and I think he plays that better than we could have ever hoped for.”
That lets McIver play something new as well.
“It gives us a little bit of insight into Sam’s longing to fit in and to have a family, and a fear of abandonment, which is quite nicely paralleled with some of Patience’s fear [and] experience of abandonment,” McIver added of the ghost’s background, left stranded in the dirt underneath the mansion for centuries. “We start to understand how our characters’ history has informed exactly where they are now in a special way this year. And that episode, for me, was obviously very helpful for understanding Sam.”
The show is set to continue expanding this year as Sam’s partner Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) opens the bed and breakfast’s new restaurant, offering another way for new characters to come into the series.
“Anything that opens up the universe is very helpful for us,” McIver shared. “Obviously, we’re in a house a lot of the time. There’s the same characters inside a house. And to have this restaurant is just kind of an injection of fresh blood coming in.”
Jay will be teaming with the show’s recurring contractor Mark (Tristan D. Lalla) to run the restaurant, also giving Jay a new playground.
“That’s really awesome for Utkash to get to play such a distinctly his storyline. And, I mean, they haven’t shown themselves to be flawless business people yet with the B and B, and I think you can kind of anticipate, certainly, things don’t go smoothly on the restaurant front either,” McIver said.
She compared the coming dynamic to that of classic farce “Fawlty Towers.”
“‘Fawlty Towers’ moments, struggling to manage the hotel with 12 people who are expecting customer service — that works well for me,” McIver said.
Rolling with a tumultuous four years
The season premiere of “Ghosts” comes following a strike-shortened third season, as well as McIver having her first child in between seasons. The star, along with the rest of the cast, has had to get used to a tumultuous run ever since launching as the Covid pandemic began.
“I mean, this show, we did our pilot table read on March 13, [2020,] like the day the world shut down, and it’s been sort of ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ to get here,” McIver quipped. The show finally premiered in the fall of 2021. “We moved [shooting] locations, from L.A. to Montreal. We survived a strike, we survived a pandemic. We survived multiple characters, actors on the show having babies. It’s been this very wild ride.
