Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Living For The Dead’ On Hulu, Where Five Queer Ghost Hunters Visit Haunted Places Around The U.S.

In Living For The Dead, a team of five ghost hunters travel the country in a funky RV and stop at places whose owners need the team to communicate with the ghosts that haunt their properties. They don’t necessarily want to get rid of the ghosts; they just want to find out what they want and if there’s a way everyone can live together without freaking out customers and residents. The five experts: Logan Taylor, a psychic; Juju Bae, a witch and spiritual healer; Alex LeMay, a ghost hunter; Ken Boggle, a tarot card reader; and Roz Hernandez, a paranormal researcher.

LIVING FOR THE DEAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from Season 1, along with the words: “Five Queer Ghost Hunters, Helping The Living, By Healing The Dead.”

The Gist: The first place the team goes to is the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. Hame, the hotel’s manager, called them in, bit both he and the owner, Vijay, are in agreement: The motel is haunted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the antics of the trickster clown ghosts have been so severe that customers are checking out in the middle of the night.

Both the owner and manager have upped the clown quotient since buying the hotel a few years ago, renovating the rooms with scary clown pictures and loading the lobby with clown figurines. When Roz takes a Polaroid of a large figurine in the middle of the lobby, she sees a reflection in the picture. Logan and Alex feel the vibe there, and they put a device there that allows whatever energy is there to respond to their prompts.

Ken is especially freaked out by this assignment, because he’s particularly afraid of clowns. During the first night, the group goes to a local watering hole, and the bartender and one of the customers tells them about the legend of the cemetery next door, which contains many victims of a mining accident in the early part of the 20th century. But one particular ghost, of the man who opened the motel almost 40 years ago, seems to be disturbed by the influx of crowds to the place. The customer, the mother of a non-binary child, brings out feelings in Ken about how his father disowned him when he came out.

After a night of scares and a few attempts to communicate with the spirits via technology, the next night the team decides to use Ken as the communicator, but he does so in “sensory depravation” fashion, with his eyes closed and headphones on his ears.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cross Ghost Hunters with Queer Eye and you get Living For The Dead.

Our Take: There are moments during the first episode of Living For The Dead that feel completely set up, like when the team is at the bar and the customer who just happened to know about the history of the motel also had a non-binary child. But it’s not like that moment didn’t generate some genuine emotions, as we saw when Roz went to reassure Ken that, despite not having a supportive parental figure when he was coming out, he’s doing just fine.

Moments like these are what we enjoyed about the series, which is produced by Kristen Stewart (who also provides some cheeky narration), celebrity hairstylist C.J. Romero and the team behind Queer Eye. The ghost hunting part is sometimes played up for camp and at tother times taken very seriously by members of the team. Listen, those parts are going to either be wildly entertaining or come off as complete horseshit, depending on what you believe about the presence of spirits. But the emotions expressed by the team and the bond they’re forging with each other and the people they help is real.

As with Queer Eye, the idea is to come out with a happy ending, where the team tries to get the spirits and the living to co-exist peacefully. We’re not looking at people who are looking to exorcise these spirits from wherever they are; it’s more about finding out why they’re there and what they want than anything else. So, as the team goes about doing that, they also get into the minds of the people who called them, to get an idea of just what is haunting them and their property.

Like we said, it gets played for camp at timers, but given the desired outcome, it’s all good to us.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As the RV pulls away from the motel, Stewart says, “I’m afraid to ask. Where to next?”

Sleeper Star: Roz Hernandez is pretty obviously the group’s leader; she seems to be the one who calms everyone down, and rallies them when they start to get frustrated. Plus, she used to be a clown when she was a kid.

Most Pilot-y Line: The show doesn’t really need Stewart’s narration. Yes, she gives the show some recognizable star power, but it seems pretty superfluous.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Like Queer Eye, Living For The Dead wants to bring a positive and celebratory vibe to the proceedings. It just happens that these proceedings happen in the middle of the night with ghosts and spirits.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.