Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fantasmas’ On HBO, Julio Torres’ Weird And Wild Sketch Series

By now, anyone who has followed Julio Torres’ career knows that he can think way outside of the box to get audiences to laugh. Five years ago, he had an HBO special entitled My Favorite Shapes, and the series he co-created, Los Espookys, wasn’t exactly standard comedy-horror fare. Now he’s back on HBO with a new series that will make everything he’s done before look normal by comparison — but it’s worth watching because of its extreme weridness.

FANTASMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Julio Torres (himself) dreams of online forms that can’t accept correct information, and of himself in a long pointy hat and a puffy jacket, opening doors and curtains and only seeing walls behind them.

The Gist: Julio visits Crayola HQ, where different colors are answering customer service calls. He pitches a new clear color, and the execs he’s meeting with wonder what the purpose is. “To color something clear is to acknowledge that things are different, and that’s just fine.” What does he want to call the color? “Fatasmas,” which is “ghosts” in Spanish. An exec convinces him to make it singular: “Fantasma.”

Julio gets into a hired car, driven by a chatty driver named Chester (Tomas Matos). Chester tells Julio to delete all of his car hire apps and just download his; he promises to even come get him if he’s driving someone else.

On the phone mounted in the back seat, a sitcom named MELF is playing; it’s about an alien who crash lands in an earth family’s home. He loves eating cookies and spaghetti for dinner. But the most interesting part is that MELF (Marc Petrocino) and the family’s dad (Paul Dano) are falling in love. He leaves his wife (Sunita Mani) and abandons his children. Hilarious, right?

Chester and Julio pick up Julio’s robot assistant Bibo (Joe Rumrill), who wants time off for a teeth cleaning, even though he’s a robot. Bibo also shows yet another urgent letter from Julio’s landlord, which Julio choses to ignore.

Julio hears a “siren call” in his head, gets out of the car and goes into a jewelry store, where he finds a tiny, oyster-shaped crystal earring. “She said it was part of a cursed antique, so I had to buy it,” he says to his “manager” Vanesja (Martine Gutierrez) at a club. Of course, he then proceeds to lose it.

The two of them share Chester’s car with a teacher (Eudora Peterson), and Julio tells them how he can feel into colors, shapes, sounds, and letters after he was hit by lightning as a kid. For instance, he tells the story of the letter Q (Steve Buscemi), who is too avant-garde and punk to be so early in the alphabet, surrounded by “normies” like P and R.

At her school, the teacher ends up using the boy’s room and is perplexed by a drawing of a penis that is shying away from the viewer. She tries to root out just which boy drew it, finding a bully who gets angry at people who do thinks that he thinks he can’t, like wearing a purple shirt.

As Julio tries to figure out if the birthmark that’s shaped like the oyster pendant he lost is growing, he records his recurring dream, where he wears the pointy hat, for analysis.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s really, really hard to make a comparison between Fantasmas and, well, any other show. Nominally, it’s a sketch show, like A Black Lady Sketch Show and others that are similar (Ziwe, who had her own sketch series, guests in episode 2). But it’s got all the weirdness of Torres’ last series, Los Espookys, and then some.

Our Take: The first few minutes of the first episode of Fantasams, which includes Emma Stone as one of its executive producers, along with Torres, is indeed very strange, and we wondered if it was going to just be one of those shows we were just not going to “get”. The minimalists sets, Torres’ positive but vaguely off-putting demeanor, the symbolic representations of things as broad as “New York” and as specific as crayons… it was a lot to take in.

But as we are introduced to the people who are going to populate Julio’s world, and the sketches that further illustrate how Julio thinks and feels, things become a bit easier to digest. Torres aims to be incidentally funny when it comes to the scenes where he interacts with people like Chester and Vanesja (pronounced “Vanessa”) and robots like Bibo, and even the sketches balance the funny with the strange and dramatic.

In the MELF sketch, for instance, Dano’s character has to contend with being estranged from his family due to his choice. Buscemi is pretty funny as the rebellious Q, but he’s also alarmed when W, X, Y and Z rocket to stardom as the back-end weird letters he wanted to be.

Through all of this, Julio keeps looking for this oyster pendant, convinced that if he compares it to his birthmark, which was once exactly the same size, he’ll be able to persuade a doctor that it’s growing and needs attention. So, through the weirdness, Torres knows that a throughline is necessary to keep things anchored to reality, even if it’s only by a micro-thin thread.

Of course, some of the sketches are just absurd, like when Bowen Yang plays a North Pole elf testifying against Santa Claus for not paying his workers, or when Alexa Demie plays a way-too-devoted insurance customer service rep who bucks the system by using her computer for personal purposes and falls under the domineering spell of a different customer service rep (the aforementioned Ziwe) when she herself needs assistance.

But with all of these insights into Torres’ psyche tied together by his search for the pendant, even if it’s an ultimately silly throughline, all of the absurdity and the messaging he tries to convey comes together into a show that’s a thought experiment that delivers laughs just when it seems it’s taking itself too seriously.

Sex and Skin: Nothing overt, but there’s always a hint of hit hanging over the show.

Parting Shot: As Bibo tries to get Julio out of his head to “look at the real problem,” Julio obsesses over the birthmark/mole, lamenting that “this is going to be a whole thing.”

Sleeper Star: Martine Gutierrez, who just goes by “Martine” in the credits, is fascinating as Vanesja, who has a very fake posh accent and is an actor who has been acting as Julio’s manager for so long, she’s now just his manager by default.

Most Pilot-y Line: In a show that’s purposely strange, it’s hard to pinpoint a line or situation that is lame, because maybe Torres made it sound or seem lame on purpose.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Fantasmas is a good example of a show where viewers just need to buckle in and enjoy the visual and auditory ride, instead of trying to figure out exactly what is going on. The less you try to compare it to any other show you’ve seen, the more you’ll enjoy this journey through Julio Torres’ head.

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.