TL;DR: Haunted Hotel is Netflix’s latest ghost comedy, and while it’s watchable and occasionally clever, it’s mostly forgettable. Good cast, decent jokes, but not enough weirdness or heart to make it memorable.

There’s a strange thing that happens when you watch a comedy about ghosts: you start expecting, almost craving, that the show itself will haunt you. Not literally, of course — though if Netflix ever does manage to beam specters through the screen, I’ll be the first to volunteer as test subject. What I mean is the way a great show lingers. It settles in like the faint smell of woodsmoke after a bonfire, or that one inside joke your friend made three summers ago that you still can’t repeat without cracking up. The problem with Netflix’s Haunted Hotel is that, despite a premise tailor-made for lingering, it evaporates almost the instant you finish an episode. Ghosts stick around. This show does not.

And I wanted it to. I wanted to be haunted — by the characters, by the jokes, by the wild supernatural lore hinted at in the margins. Instead, I found myself smiling politely at its antics, like someone being cornered by a wedding DJ’s banter. Pleasant, fine, sometimes even charming. But unforgettable? Not so much.

The setup is familiar in the way that sitcoms often are: Katherine, voiced with weary warmth by Eliza Coupe, inherits a crumbling hotel that happens to double as a supernatural crash pad. She’s raising two kids, awkward teen Ben (Skyler Gisondo, forever typecast as “the human embodiment of a nervous shrug”) and scheming preteen Esther (Natalie Palamides, who is easily the breakout of the bunch). Hovering around them is Nathan, Katherine’s dead brother, played with Will Forte’s usual blend of goofball sincerity and arrested development. Oh, and there’s Abaddon, a demon trapped in the body of an 18th-century boy, who alternates between smug superiority and something resembling affection.

It sounds busy because it is. Every half-hour episode juggles ghosts, cults, zombies, spectral girlfriends, and even the occasional homicidal suite of hotel furniture. And yet the end result rarely feels dense; it feels thin, stretched across tropes you’ve seen before and jokes that melt before they hit your funny bone. It’s sitcom déjà vu with a paranormal filter.

The obvious comparison here is CBS’s Ghosts — and indeed, Haunted Hotel borrows heavily from that show’s conceit of undead roommates and their fixation on modern human foibles. But where Ghosts delights in fleshing out its ensemble, Haunted Hotel struggles to carve out identities for anyone besides Esther, who at least gets flashes of depth beneath her manipulative exterior. Most of the others are familiar sketches we’ve seen before: Forte’s Nathan is the lovable screw-up, Coupe’s Katherine is the frazzled but good-hearted mom, Gisondo is the nerdy kid who just wants to belong. They’re played well — you’d expect nothing less from this cast — but they never evolve into more than their archetypes.

Part of the frustration is that you can see the potential lurking at the edges. A throwaway reference to a “death day looper” — a ghost stuck reliving their demise over and over — hints at a ghost taxonomy that could have been fascinating. A late-season time-travel arc briefly flirts with actual emotional resonance, showing what it looks like when love becomes an act of devotion across centuries. Even a bizarre plot about a jealous honeymoon suite stalking Katherine manages to be creepier, funnier, and weirder than the bulk of the series. These moments feel like the writers testing out bolder flavors before retreating back to vanilla.

And vanilla is exactly what the art style delivers, too. The ghosts are colorful, sure, but never particularly inventive. We’re still stuck in that early-2000s Flash-animation comfort zone, where “adult animation” looks sleek but safe, as though designed to be easily memed without ever demanding too much attention. Compare this to the gonzo aesthetic risks of Rick and Morty (co-executive producer Dan Harmon’s fingerprints are faint but present here), and Haunted Hotel feels timid.

Timid might be the best word for the whole show, honestly. It doesn’t want to alienate you, doesn’t want to offend you, doesn’t want to push you too far out of your comfort zone. That’s not inherently a crime — not every animated comedy has to be a neon nightmare full of nihilism. But the problem with being aggressively pleasant is that it leaves no aftertaste. The second the credits roll, you’re already reaching for something else in the algorithm’s buffet.

I don’t mean to undersell the cast, though, because they are the show’s saving grace. Forte can wring pathos out of even the dumbest line delivery, and Coupe makes Katherine’s exasperation feel lived-in. Gisondo’s timing is impeccable as always, and Palamides manages to steal every scene she’s in by making Esther feel like a pint-sized sociopath who might also, secretly, just want someone to tuck her in at night. Even the guest stars — Kumail Nanjiani, Jenifer Lewis, Randall Park — pop in with enough verve to jolt the energy levels for a few minutes. But the writing never fully matches the talent assembled here. It’s like watching an all-star band forced to play background music at a brunch spot.

And maybe that’s the final nail in Haunted Hotel’s coffin: it’s a brunch show. Perfectly fine to have on in the background while you scroll your phone, check your fantasy league, or fold laundry. It won’t demand much of you, and it won’t give you much in return. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a line that makes you chuckle, or a subplot that briefly makes you sit up straighter. But then it drifts away, as ephemeral as the spirits populating its halls.

If Netflix decides to renew it, my hope is that the show leans into its freakier instincts. Let the ghosts get weirder. Let the family dynamics get messier. Let the show risk alienating people, because the only way to haunt your audience is to get under their skin a little. For now, though, Haunted Hotel checks you in, gives you clean sheets and a mint on the pillow, and then politely asks you to leave without ever really making itself at home in your memory.

Final Verdict: 

Haunted Hotel isn’t bad so much as it is safe — the kind of animated comedy that coasts on charm without ever taking the big swings that might make it special. The cast does the heavy lifting, and there are hints of something stranger and more affecting buried deep inside. But for now, the show is just another guest in Netflix’s overcrowded lobby, and it leaves without making much noise.