As another spooky season descends upon us, let us turn our attention to horror. The genre is all over series TV: zombies are rampaging through All of Us Are Dead and multiple Walking Deads; Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches is soon to join her Interview With the Vampire on AMC; Mike Flanagan simply can’t stop raising ghosts on his various Netflix shows. Horror has even permeated comedy: some of TV’s edgiest sitcoms are steeped in it. And yet, as Los Espookys showed in its most recent episode, there may be no horror more chilling than an old-fashioned TV show.
For the uninitiated, HBO’s Los Espookys revolves around the titular “horror group.” In an unidentified Spanish-speaking country, Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti), Andrés (Julio Torres), and Tati (Ana Fabrega) hire themselves out to create scary effects to their clients’ specs. Sometimes these are endearingly unconvincing simulacra of paranormal situations. When a seaside town risks ruin because the wig-wearing owl that serves as its primary tourist attraction loses its wig, for example, Tati posts up at the waterfront as the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, yelling “Yabba dabba do!” at passersby. Other times, Los Espookys trigger real supernatural events, as when American ambassador Melanie Gibbons (Greta Titelman) wants to fake her own kidnapping to double the length of her vacation, and Los Espookys accidentally trap her in a cursed mirror. Basically, it’s a show about practical effects for moderately practical use.
Around client-of-the-week stories, season arcs also unfold. Chocolate heir Andrés tries to cope with the loss of status that has accompanied his estrangement from his parents. Simple soul Tati accidentally becomes a best-selling plagiarist. Renaldo is haunted by a beauty queen who, immediately after being crowned Our Latin Beauty, is killed on stage by an anchor. Given the high stakes of our heroes’ travails, many viewers may not have even noticed the establishment of a season-long fixture that doesn’t seem to involve any of Los Espookys’ series regulars: Mi Puta Suegra.
A comedic multi-cam telenovela that manages to be both hateful and corny, Mi Puta Suegra (My Fucking Mother-in-Law) is first introduced in the Season 2 premiere, when we see Renaldo and his teenaged sister Beatriz (Giannina Fruttero) watching the title card on their mother’s TV. Later, when Los Espookys meet a cemetery groundskeeper, Oliver Twix (Sebastián Ayala), he hustles them out to watch the show, and join him: henpecked “Fernando” (Gabriel Urzúa) is just trying to relax in the living room when his Fucking Mother-in-Law (Amparo Noguera) barks at him to turn off the TV, then falls into a slapstick somersault. Evidently a huge hit, Mi Puta Suegra keeps coming up: depressed, Renaldo’s Uncle Tico (Fred Armisen) watches the Mother-in-Law order Fernando to give her a foot massage; Oliver Twix delights in the Mother-in-Law hanging a portrait of herself behind Fernando and spitting that now she’ll “always be watching” him. The show seems one or two notches more offensive than Married … With Children or Two and a Half Men. Why does it keep coming up?
The answer lies in this week’s episode, “The Virus (El Virus).” A gag in which the Mother-in-Law pours Fernando’s beer over his head drives Isabel, the actress who plays her, to a dark moment in her dressing room, but instead of swallowing the pills in her purse, she digs out Los Espookys’ card. When she meets with the group, she tells them that headlining Mi Puta Suegra for the past 37 years has destroyed her spirit, but since she signed a lifelong contract, she needs Los Espookys to free her by getting the show cancelled. Renaldo says he’ll do it for his dad, a huge fan of the show whom Renaldo misses every day. Using green screen animation tricks, Renaldo takes over the studio monitors, claiming to be a computer virus that will break all their devices if Mi Puta Suegra isn’t cancelled. The effect works, and Isabel takes one final bow with her colleagues, all of them sadly reciting the Mother-in-Law’s classic catchphrase in unison: “Get off the couch, you drunk, and come give your fucking mother-in-law a foot massage.”
It’s not until the final episode of Mi Puta Suegra airs that we understand Renaldo’s personal connection. His father isn’t dead, he’s just been holed up in his bedroom for the past several years watching the show, and only emerges upon its end to see the children he barely seems to register. After mentioning a couple of his favorite moments, he sighs, “What an awful woman. I don’t know what I’ll do with my life now that my show is over.” Beatriz makes the mistake of telling him there will probably be reruns, at which her father immediately gets up, returns to his room, closes the door, and turns the TV back on. In a world in which people easily accept the existence of (Espookys-created) aliens, sea monsters, and unquiet ghosts, Mi Puta Suegra is an even worse abomination: a cynical and witless show that still has the power to seduce and possess countless viewers, separating parents from their children and narcotizing Oliver Twix such that he can’t even be bothered to bury the cemetery’s corpses in the right graves. (Okay, fine, it’s unclear whether Oliver Twix would have cared that much about his job regardless of what TV he watched, but the point stands.)
Los Espookys is, incredibly, not the only horror-tinged sitcom executing a multi-episode take on another TV genre this year: it also happened on What We Do in the Shadows. In the Season 4 premiere of FX’s vampire-com, a quasi-sequel to the 2014 feature film mockumentary of the same name, Laszlo (Matt Berry) tells us about being thrust into fatherhood by the arrival of a baby who looks remarkably like Colin Robinson (Matt Proksch), an energy vampire/former roommate who died, and out of whose corpse the baby emerged. Spending a lot of time at home, Laszlo has gotten hooked on Go Flip Yourself, a home renovation show hosted by identical-twin contractors Bran and Toby Daltry (Randy and Jason Sklar). As the season goes on, we see bits of the show as Laszlo screens it, and even a full promo before an actual WWDITS commercial break. The payoff: the season’s eighth WWDITS is presented as a full episode of Go Flip Yourself, in which the Daltrys come to the vampires’ Staten Island mansion to give it a much-needed makeover. Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) kills Toby as soon as he walks through the door; hypnotism is required to keep the rest of the crew from remembering any vampiric activity they may witness in the course of their work; and the vampires’ familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) has to intercede to stop Bran from pulling off his light-filled ground-floor concept. When the final reveal proves disappointing, there’s a reason: “Bran” is Laszlo’s vampire nemesis Simon the Devious (Nick Kroll), who created the show and made 150 episodes as part of a long con to steal back a witch-skin hat he and Laszlo have been fighting over for decades.
From lighting to art direction to performance and even down to the titular Mother-in-Law’s cheap and ratty wig, Mi Puta Suegra is note-perfect in its recreation of a junky novela’s garish aesthetic; we get it without having to watch a full episode’s worth. What gives the spoof its resonance is what we see of its effects on the world that surrounds it: Isabel’s despair at the thought of remaining in the role; Renaldo’s father’s addiction. Because the spoof of a home renovation show can easily integrate What We Do in the Shadows’ cast members, on the other hand, the full-length Go Flip Yourself gets to send up many tropes of the genre: the identical twin co-hosts who also have a signature line of home goods at Kohl’s, like Property Brothers’ Drew and Jonathan Scott; the unconvincing acting of the homeowners; the 11th-hour construction holdup; Simon’s claim that he absolutely can still air this episode, despite the murder caught on camera, since no one at the network actually watches it before putting it out. The brilliance of the setup is not only that it requires the vampire characters to fake humanity; it also gives all the series regulars different goals to accomplish, sometimes at cross-purposes, while faking humanity. It’s hard to imagine another TV genre into which WWDITS could so effectively drop its characters. (Honorable mention to the brief Season 1 peek of Laszlo’s performance as Jerry in a pornographic parody of Seinfeld.)
Los Espookys’ Renaldo is, by his own estimation, obsessed with horror to the exclusion of all other pursuits. But the hold Mi Puta Suegra has on Renaldo’s father may be one of the darkest stories Los Espookys has told—and remember, this is in a season that also features a recurring ghoul with a large piece of maritime equipment pierced through her torso. By contrast—and ironically, given that it’s in a show about a) murderers who are b) undead, What We Do in the Shadows’ Go Flip Yourself episode ends up strangely life-affirming: However fraudulent the Daltrys’ show turns out to be, the Staten Islanders are encouraged to imagine a version of their home that they’d be happier and more comfortable in, while still continuing to share it, together. Take it from TV’s biggest Goths: Home reno shows aren’t necessarily a guilty pleasure, whereas watching a misogynistic sitcom could make you an accessory to killing an actress’s soul.
