In the CBS sitcom "Ghosts," a palpable hit by the usual reckonings and already renewed for a second season, Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar play Samantha and Jay, a New York couple who inherit an estate upstate on the death of Sam's aunt. She's a freelance journalist; he's a chef without a kitchen. While setting the place in order, Sam falls down a flight of stairs, and when she returns to the house after a three-week coma, discovers she can see the place's other inhabitants, a motley crew of spirits who have died on the property across the years — some before the house was built, or the United States were united, or even states.
They include, in reverse chronological order of death, Trevor, a Wall Street type, forever pants-less (Asher Grodman); Pete, a scoutmaster (Richie Moriarty) shot by a stray arrow while introducing his troop to archery, the arrow still sticking through his neck like a novelty store gag; Flower (Sheila Carrasco), who tried to make friends with a bear; Alberta (Danielle Pinnock), a Jazz Age singer, the precise cause of whose death is discovered during the first season; Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky), a haughty Gilded Age doyenne, the house's original inhabitant and Sam's fourth great-grandmother; Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones), a Revolutionary War officer, dead from dysentery, who after two and a half centuries still does not understand that he's gay; Sasappis, called Sas (Román Zaragoza), from the Lenape Nation; and Thorfinn (Devan Chandler), a Viking struck by lightning. There are also a number of cholera victims in the basement and a few British redcoats in a shack out back.
The ghosts are disturbed at first by the new owners' plan to turn the house into a bed and breakfast. They don't like the thought of strangers crowding up the place and sleeping in their rooms. (They all have rooms, and they do sleep.) They try to haunt the couple out. But soon enough the dead come to accommodate the quick and the quick to appreciate the dead. Jay, who cannot see the ghosts, soon believes that Sam can, and begins to enjoy hearing about them. ("It's like watching 'Friends,' except you can't see or hear 'Friends' and you only have one person to tell you what it's about.") Eventually, they will play Dungeons and Dragons together.
