The Unabashed Anti-Comedy of <em>Fantasmas</em>

Halfway through HBO’s new six-episode series Fantasmas, an entrepreneur named Denise explains the very particular service she provides: dressing up toilets in costumes. “It breaks my heart to see them naked, undignified, shivering in the cold as they swallow our daily filth,” proclaims the woman, played by the Saturday Night Live alum Aidy Bryant. Like an overeager Vanna White, Denise shows off some of her designs: a bedazzled denim set, a silvery sheath, a bright-yellow skirt for a toilet that’s—sorry, who’s—“daydreaming of a Hawaiian honeymoon with a man she’ll never meet.” She then warns viewers not to ask her how much her wares cost.

The “ad” runs for almost three minutes. It nonsensically flashes back to Denise’s childhood. It has nothing to do with anything in the plot of Fantasmas. It’s silly and stupid and strange—and I couldn’t stop laughing.

Fantasmas, which premieres Friday, is filled with such irresistible detours. Written and directed by the comedian Julio Torres, who’s best known for masterminding some of SNL’s most surreal sketches, such as “Papyrus” and “Wells for Boys,” the half-hour series is Torres’s latest absurdist experiment. He plays a version of himself, an artist also named Julio, who’s trying to find a precious earring he lost. Along the way, he drifts into scenarios that seem to have no bearing on his quest but nonetheless contain layers of profundity. Denise’s commercial, for instance, catches Julio’s eye when it plays on a monitor at an internet café; by the time it ends, Julio is watching it on his phone, suggesting that he sought it out himself—or that it’s just part of a stream of ubiquitous, unavoidable promotional #content everyone has to sit through. Julio couldn’t look away, and Fantasmas is similarly mesmerizing. The show’s incongruous sketches capture the preposterousness of trying to exist as an individual untethered from corporate entities, personal branding, and the abyss that is today’s internet. It’s not exactly funny, but it is entirely relatable.

[Read: A movie that understands the absurdity of the American dream]

To anyone familiar with Torres’s work, including his recent film, Problemista, and the delightful comedy series Los Espookys, these themes may not seem new. Torres regularly uses audacious visuals to interrogate the logic of living in our late-capitalist era; there’s nothing more amusing, his stories insist, than being in a world that values companies over people, that forces humans to endure bureaucratic labyrinths just to deem themselves, well, human.

But even compared with Torres’s other projects, Fantasmas is uniquely confounding. Its narrative, for starters, is almost shapeless. Julio’s lost earring offers the lightest of plot anchors, leaving Fantasmas prone to tangents about whatever’s been on Torres’s mind: the flawed U.S. health-care system, the influencer economy, The Dress (you know, the one that’s white and gold). Precious screen time gets spent exploring, say, a robot’s attempt to break into acting or a vicious legal battle between one of Santa’s overworked elves and his bosses. Some episodes scrutinize Julio’s insistence on prioritizing creativity over consumerism, questioning whether his defiance is genuine or a gimmick. His manager, Vanesja (the j is silent, naturally), played wonderfully by the performance artist Martine Gutierrez, pushes Julio to star in a credit-card commercial. A network executive encourages Julio to write a script about coming out to his abuela. Julio accepts these requests despite his insistence that he won’t commodify his identity, because how else is he supposed to make rent? He doesn’t even have the new identification document called the “proof of existence.”

[Read: The strangely charming world of Los Espookys]

As always with Torres’s work, there’s plenty of cheerful whimsy in Fantasmas. Tilda Swinton voices the element of water. Steve Buscemi plays the letter Q. But the show’s most impressive flourish is the way it evokes puppet theater: The actors roam sets that look unfinished, the camera frequently tracks them from a bird’s-eye view, and when Julio thinks, his thoughts pop up like silent-film intertitles. Fantasmas is an explosion of Torres’s sensibility, and its aesthetic verve is perhaps the best and most meta thing about it. He used HBO’s money—corporate spoils, if you will—to make something that doesn’t look made for TV but more like an unusually pointed Dr. Seuss book. (Oh, the Sponsored Content You’ll Make!)

The word fantasmas, Julio explains early in the series, means “ghosts” in Spanish. It’s what he wants to call the color “clear,” a shade he pitches to the crayon company Crayola. He’s incorporated this joke into his stand-up material in the past, but like the show’s own concepts, such recycling serves a new purpose. If his other recent work has come with a noticeable melancholy amid the surrealism, Fantasmas offers pure, playful glee. To some viewers, there may be no use for a clear crayon. But others may see what Julio sees: that it’s one more way to turn what’s frustrating about this world into something more fun.