By Lori Acken
What do you get when you pair up two of entertainment’s funniest guys, then add some genuine scares, a buddy-flick sensibility and monster-of-the-week fun?
The perfect comedy to usher in the Halloween season.
Ghosted (beginning Sunday, Oct. 1, on FOX) follows the misadventures of Leroy Wright (Craig Robinson, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), a downtrodden cop turned mall security guard, and struggling paranormal author Max Jennifer (Adam Scott, Parks and Recreation), who is certain his wife was abducted by aliens. Recruited by a kooky secret bureau led by no-nonsense Capt. Lafrey (Ally Walker) to track down the missing agent who handpicked the unlikely duo to save him, Leroy and Max embark on a mission that may venture into the supernatural — though Leroy doesn’t believe that business for a minute.
“When we meet Max, he’s somewhat of a ruined man,” says Scott, who recently displayed serious dramatic chops in HBO’s Big Little Lies. “He was a professor in astrophysics at Stanford and started writing papers on the multiverse and his belief in the paranormal and aliens — and he became a laughingstock. But he still has this optimism to him. In the series, Max is slowly on his way to redemption, professionally and personally. Same with Craig’s character. We meet these guys at the bottom and see how they are clawing their way back, through the bureau.”
Scott says the show aims for the “tone and spirit” of hit ’80s action/buddy films — 48 Hrs., Midnight Run and, yes, Ghostbusters — and his odd-couple chemistry with Robinson is belly-laugh funny. “Adam and I will have a ‘will they or won’t they’ vibe throughout the series,” Robinson jokes. Nonetheless, says Ghosted writer/executive producer Kevin Etten, the series won’t sacrifice scares for the sake of a laugh. “We ended up cutting a few jokes to preserve the tension and to keep it a little more grounded and real, because we felt like the laughs would end up bigger if you keep it really tense — and then there’s that release.”
Walker — a Sons of Anarchy and Longmire alum — is thrilled to flex her own comic muscle in a power-suited character Etten likens to master motivator/manipulators like Steve Jobs or former Lakers coach Phil Jackson. “She’s a mom,” a grinning Walker retorts.
Only Robinson will cop to a personal ghostly experience — and he really doesn’t want to talk about it — but creator Tom Gormican jokes that the one time he thought his own house was haunted, “it turned out to be a home invasion.” Of the not-paranormal kind.
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