Ghosts, the CBS adaptation of the UK sitcom, is a show about community and growth.
The show focuses on a married couple—one clairvoyant (Rose McIver’s Sam) and one not so much (Utkarsh Ambudkar’s Jay)—who inherit a family estate and decide to turn it into a destination inn and restaurant. The hotel is frequently devoid of the living, but it turns out that the land is a happening place if you’re a dead person who (for reasons that are mysterious) never left this earthly plane after your demise.
These ghosts (and Sam) have become each other’s new family. And, since being dead buys you a lot of time to work on personal growth, they’ve also learned that it’s never too late to adapt.
Throughout the three previous seasons, we’ve seen the coming-out story of a Revolutionary War soldier (Brandon Scott Jones’ Isaac Higgintoot), an elitist robber baroness have a sexual awakening (Rebecca Wisocky’s Hetty Woodstone) and a Prohibition jazz singer find posthumous fame (Danielle Pinnock’s Alberta Haynes). None of these characters would have been able to make these moves if it weren’t for the other humans in their orbit.
Even the most pompous personalities—cough, Asher Grodman’s finance bro Trevor Lefkowitz—thrive and grow and can be more-or-less content to be stuck somewhere for eternity as long as they’re with others who make it bearable.
The fourth season of Ghosts, which premieres at 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 17, hammers this message home with the introduction of a novelty for an otherwise positive series that just happens to be about dead people: a legitimately scary ghost.
As teased in the third season finale, Veep and The Big Door Prize actress Mary Holland joins this year as Patience, the spirit of a Puritan woman who was accidentally separated from the group of ghosts about a hundred-odd years ago. While everyone else was back at the inn and learning about the wonders of flatscreen TVs (or TVs at all) and air conditioning, Patience was in the dirt, growing more alone and more feral.
And she’s very angry about it. Finally figuring out a way back to the house at the end of last season, Patience seemingly took revenge on the ghost who got her there: Jones’ Isaac, whose inopportune sneezing fit caused him to drop her hand and lose her to the ground.
To be fair, it turns out Patience was always kind of a stick in the mud. The new season’s premiere teaches us that, when she was alive, she was kicked out of her community of Puritan settlers for being too pious (she believed a five-year-old who talked to a doll was a witch). Having always felt like an outsider in life and in death, Patience assumed the other ghosts didn’t want her around either. The dirt was just another form of banishment by those she trusted but who, ultimately, didn’t understand her.
Because of all those years spent alone and wondering if solitude was a punishment or a test from above, Patience has picked up a few new personality traits. She has the propensity to scream “patience, Patience” as a form of flagellation and wields deadly stares like she’s auditioning to play Annie Wilkes in a remake of Misery. And all this is before we learn in the second episode that she has a special ghost power that, while being a little aberrational for the show, fits more in line with what we’ve been taught to expect from hauntings and the paranormal.
