Pop Culture Happy Hour - Haunted Hotel

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

From one of the minds behind Rick and Morty, Netflix’s new animated comedy Haunted Hotel is the perfect mix of fun and creepy to kick off spooky season. Will Forte voices a ghost who previously ran the Undervale, a very, very haunted old hotel. The show follows his attempts to show his family the ropes, vis a vis ghosts, demons, bleeding mirrors, and possession.To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

In Netflix's new animated comedy Haunted Hotel, you get a lot of fast funny jokes, you get terrific voice acting from Eliza Coupe and Will Forte, and you get a setting, a massive old hotel that's just the right mix of fun and creepy. Also, not for nothing, you get some actual lore to make sense of it all, which is helpful because there's a lot of ghosts in the hotel, each with their own schick, and things get pretty wild. I'm Glenn Weldon, and today we're talking about Haunted Hotel on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is Walter Chow.

He's a writer, critic, and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Welcome back, Walter. Hey, great to be here. Always get to have you. Also, with us is Jeff Yang. He's a cultural critic and author of The Golden Screen, the movies that made Asian America. Hey, Jeff. Hey, always great to talk to you, Glenn.

Always great to have you to talk to. In Haunted Hotel, Eliza Coupe plays Catherine. She moves into The Undervale, a very haunted old hotel with her family. There's her son, Ben, a hapless teen, voiced by, Skyler Gisando, and her daughter Esther, a practitioner of black magic who's more than a match for anything the hotel can throw at them. Mostly, she's voiced by Natalie Palomides. Catherine's dead brother Nathan is around to show them the ropes vis-a-vis ghosts and demons and bleeding mirrors and possession, etc. That is Will Forte. Also on hand, though much,

much less helpful, is Abadon, a demon trapped in the body of a boy from the 1700s. He is voiced with Sinister Relish by Jimmy Simpson. Haunted Hotel is streaming on Netflix. Creator Matt Roller has worked on several shows, including Rick and Morty, Jeff. Full disclosure, I love this. Did you love this? So I guess I land in this space of

it didn't have to be as good as it did, right? That this is a series, it's landing during quote, quote, scary season, it's going to have some sort of built-in audience. Netflix animation. I mean, you know, it has a lot of stuff that feels a bit mid. But it also has stuff that kind of lifts the curve.

And I think we talked about exploding kittens before. Again, that was a series that just, you know, it didn't have to be that great, but it was actually better than I expected. And that's how I feel about this. There are definitely a couple of solid jokes every episode. There's definitely some really fantastic world building, which again was unexpected. And just in general, there are things that make it worth watching. but there's also a very strange mix of tones, some choices that feel a little uncomfortable.

And at the end of the day, I would say that it's a bit of a watch at your own risk, especially if you're watching it as family viewing. I'm not sure this is necessarily a show. I'd want to have like a sub-13 in the co-pilot seat watching with me. Right. That's interesting. Walter, watch at your own risk.

Is that where you came down? Well, yeah, I mean, I think I have that advice for everything. But I would say that there's something about this that I like creed spotting horror references. Sure. Big horror geek. You know, they have cereal. It's called Great Guy Serial. There's a Chucky doll on the front of it.

You know, the killer in one of the episodes is wearing the burlap sack from Friday the 13th Part 2. So there's stuff that I like to say, hey, you know, I'm the guy in the theater that nudges his date and says, hey, look at that. There's this Shrekian endorphin rush from being the most irritating fan in the audience. That part appeals to me. There's a prurient part of it that appeals to me. But some of that familiarity, I think, drags a little bit for me. Like, this feels a lot like Bob's Burgers. That seems to be the template.

It feels a lot like Great North. You know, all of these great vehicles for our stand-up comedians, you know, going all the way back to Squiggle Vision, right, with Dr. Katz and everything. Sure. Stand-up comedians that really get to show their stuff. And Will Forte, I think, really does a great job in this series. But I can't overcome this feeling of familiarity. And once I know that, you know,

It's done by one of the guys from Rick and Morty who also worked at community. I kind of know what's going on here. And I kind of expect some of that stuff to be happening here, too. And, you know, to Jeff's point, there's certain issues that they bring up where suddenly, like, in the middle of community, there'll be the serious episode of community where we talk about generational trauma. We talk about real life issues in the middle of all the madness and the slapstickiness. That's fun and great.

But then there's this sort of like, let's ground it in. We're actually serious here. We're artists people. And Rick and Morty, I think, does that sometimes too. more successfully, I think, but maybe only because Rick and Morty's and it's, you know, multiple seasons now. Maybe we've had time with these characters and, you know, but I feel like a lot of threads are begun in this first season that aren't necessarily satisfied in a way that it feels right to me. I may be expecting too much from a first season, but yeah, I'm sort of overall

on the fence. I'd wait for season three before I say this is successful. Okay, well, I jumped over the fence. I'm not on the fence. I am with both feet. I really does. this. I hear what you're saying, Jeff, this is better than it has any right to be, because I am very hit or miss with adult animated series, but maybe I'm changing or they're changing because I really love long story short, and I kind of love this. But I'll be honest, there is a cheat code to my heart, and her name is Eliza Coupe. I am helpless before her. Her Jane, in the great sitcom Happy Endings, is a brilliant comic creation I keep returning to because you can watch that character processing what other characters are saying, and you can hear her reaction in her

line readings you hear what she's not saying, what she's holding back. And you say to me, Glenn, you're talking about dialogue. You're talking about acting. That's what acting is. Yes. But there is, I maintain another dimension to her performance on that show. And it's all in, appropriate enough for this, in her voice, in her inflection, in her rhythm of her delivery. She makes hundreds of choices. That's what, where she leads, I follow. You get Will Forte. Will Forte playing maybe the most quintessentially Will Forte character. It's possible to be a chipper goofball. I cannot imagine anyone else in that role. Wait, wait, wait. That's not a ghost. Was he trying to murder us?

Technically, yes, but I don't think his heart was in it. Doesn't it sound like something Will Forte would say? But we also get a lot of lore. Jeff, you mentioned this too. So much lore world building, as I guess we'd call it, gets crammed into the show just in the pilot. The great Jennifer Lewis shows up as an exorcist, which of course Will Forte's Nathan resents. And then just Offhandedly, she drops some truth that turns out to be actually kind of central to the show. There's a logic to the supernatural misfeeling. Ghosts have power over demons. Demons over humans. And with the proper tools, humans hold dominion over ghosts.

Great, it's weird. Rock paper scissors. Now let him go. Of course. So there's a lot of moving parts, but I really felt they all fit together well. Let's talk about the Rick and Morty aspect of it, though. I didn't get that kind of edge lord vibe from this show that I get from Rick and Morty. Does your mileage vary?

You know, I feel like this in some ways is directly an expression of the prominence of the show, right? If we're talking about, you know, Matt Roller, the creator of the show, he has Rick and Morty in his jeans, and that's what they're kind of putting face front here. They're saying this from creators of Rick and Morty, right? Sure. But he also worked on the Goldbergs. And I think this show really wants to be a happy marriage. between Famcom and kind of edge lordy, you know, techno-anarchic type humor, except in this case

would be misto-inarchic, I suppose. And that's where I think some of the tension occurs. I mean, look, I love the voices. I think the voice acting is fantastic. The guest's voices are just, you know, mind-blowing. As soon as you hear like Randall Park and Ricky Lindholm and Kumal Nanjani, you instantly know the characters, and they're playing both in and out of type in ways that I think are really interesting. And as you mentioned, the lore is great. I mean, I don't think I've seen this particular type of treatment to unpack some of the things that were all sort of like, why is that in ghost movies, that blank, blank, blank is the case quite as well done as here? And that's the kind of thing which just feels like the kind of insider humor that Walter is referencing,

not so much the Easter eggs, you know, kind of referring to other shows or other movies, but just asking those frequently asked questions in a way that unpacks them in an absurdist and funny fashion. That works for me. I look at it and I'm like, I'm just kind of train spotting stuff here, and I can't help it. You know, I mean, there's the obvious stuff where there's like Donald Sutherland, someone that looks just like and kind of appears as a teacher, but as a reference, not only the invasion of the body staturedress that he was in, but to Animal House. And so, you know, I'm just sort of over here.

Just my endorphins are going nuts. It's like, you know, one of those little games that you play on your phone, you know, just like, here's another 99 cents that feels really, really good, you know, to do that. And so these are like microtransaction things. And, you know, I guess when you describe Rick and Morty as Edge Lord, it's like, that is true, unfortunately. But I don't want to continue to seed ground to Edge Lords because the reason I love Rick and Morty is that it really gets at existential issues about identity itself and stuff.

And it seems to predict certain things like the right. of fascism in the world in our country. And it gets so much right. There's so many things that it deals with. And I think Hon. Hotel wants a lot of that, too. You couldn't find a better cast to do it. I'm with you on that.

And I love that Eliza Coupe is given, I think, two full episodes in a 10-episode season where it's just about her dating life, which is great. And she goes on a date with Randall Park, and he's the best kind of awkward. And he's not coded to me as... Randall Park is always the best kind of awkward.

Let's be honest. And I love that if none of it is, like, stereotypically Asian. He's not long duck dong. He's doing something that's really fascinating and human. And I think where the show soars for me is when it is the most human. And unfortunately, it's good enough at that. And the cast is good enough at that, that when they drop little breadcrumbs about backstories for some of these characters,

and then actually kind of deal with the trauma of these kids have gone through with a loss of the father, these little hints of it that are dropped here, they land maybe harder than they intend them to, that they're not the same kind of joky as the rest of it. And it kind of knocks me out. It feels like, all right, I'm ready. You know, strap me in. I'm ready to deal with this. You know, Dick Van Patten tell me the way.

But it doesn't stay there, right? And I love the mythos. I love that there's Cthulhu in this. I love that. There's so much stuff that I do love about this. And then there's an episode that seems to be dealing with trans issues and male loneliness. You know, why can't I transform? I just want to change and all the stuff.

And then they kind of played off at the end. It's like, no, I didn't mean transform. That way, I meant I just needed a, wait a minute, be serious about this stuff. If you're actually going to be a show in 2025, talk about the issues that are big issues and don't hit around them jokily as though they're not getting people killed or that people wouldn't be watching this and saying, wait a minute, I came here for the Rick and Morty, I'm part of the Edge Lord group with Rick and Morty, and they're actually dealing with my loneliness. And they're dealing with my inability to form relationships, but they don't.

Well, yeah, I will agree with you that this show isn't always. was in control of itself. It does raise the issue of, for example, suicide. And it doesn't do it in a sustained enough way that, you know, when you introduce something that big, it's going to hang over the show and you can't put that back in the box. And so what they're doing is they're raising it to address it more fully, I think, if they get a second season. But in the meantime, we're stuck with it. It's taking the tone of the show and it's a gravity sink. And the show isn't equipped to handle what it raises in that particular case? I think that being equipped to address some of these sort of deeper moments of human reality

is a challenge for any show that tries to embrace that surreal anarchy to begin with, right? It's sort of like, we're not going to take anything seriously. But at the same time, we also want to have you feel like we're being honest and serious and authentic enough to address some stuff, which frankly, is a big enough issue to some viewers that this is what I was talking about, but like not being entirely certain if many parents will feel comfortable sitting next to their kids and having them exposed to certain things in this show, ideas in the show, issues addressed and confronted through this medium.

I mean, it does bill itself as an adult animated series, which is, you know, this is what makes it sound a lot spicier that it turns out to be. But, you know, at the same time, it's about big scary monsters. So we're stretching that definition of adult. I did want to talk about some of the rest of this cast because everybody's so good. Skyler Gisando plays a similar role here than he did in the Santa Clarita Diet back in the day. He plays this hapless kid who's surrounded by dark stuff who just keeps his head up. I'll have to figure out what to wear.

Okay, the blue dress you wore when we had the consul with that children's therapist, the brown boots you wore when Avedon fell out of the car, and the jacket I told you made me see my mom as a woman. I notice. He's made for roles like that, right? I don't always buy him when he does his slick jerk rolls like he was in licorice pizza. But as a nerdy kid who completely owns himself, who knows himself, I kind of love him here. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about Eliza Coupis, your North Star, Skylar Giustondo, in many ways is mine.

Okay. I really adore him. I love his timing, his delivery. I thought he was a really funny choice to be Jimmy Olson and Superman, the kid that doesn't realize how hot he is. There's something really funny about that and really wise about casting Skylar, I think. Yeah, every line delivery is gold for me. there's an episode just devoted to him, splitting into different personality parts of him, including one that's hyper-confident and one that's super horny and one that's a cat, I think.

A dad. That was a hilarious beat to like have one of them be just dad. You know, there's so many good moments that are perfect for his sense of time. You know, perfect for all of these guys. Having him play off of Coupe and play off of, you know, this cast is just, it's heaven to me. And to have, like, not the limitations of a regular sort of, you know, two-camera set, sitcom or something is also a blessing. I like to have, you know, the ability to go through dimensions and the follow-through spaces and stuff like that. That's fun.

And I think these guys are agile enough as voice actors to handle that. I want to send some props, too, to Natalie Palamedes because I really do think the sibling dynamic is just completely nailed in this show between Ben and Esther. And a lot of it is she has to carry extra weight because she's, in many cases, you know, kind of like the DSX Diabolus, right, of a lot of these episodes. And also, let's throw some props also to Jimmy Simpson as Abadon. Yeah. He's basically doing, you know, Stewie from Family Guy. Sure. But he does it incredibly well.

And, I mean, the way that the three of them as mismatched siblings, it's kind of part for the course for adult animation that's around families that you have this. particular selection, you know, the naive and then the kind of weird evil one and then the sort of like alien oddball type. But that's true for animation in general. Like Disney movies have to have two mascots, one who can talk, one who can't. That's just a rule now. Yeah, it's interesting because I think the Esther character, the Natalie Palomides role, is important to have here because, again, for the world building, right, she is someone who seems to have a handle on things. So we're not worried all the time about this family until things get to be too much for it. Then that's the show queuing you. You need to be worried now. And her friendship with

Jimmy Simpson-Abbotton, as you mentioned, is a lot of fun. And as Abidon, the demon child, Jimmy Simpson is giving it just the right amount of spice. He's going to be the last voice you hear in this clip. The point is, I'm starting today by fixing up the honeymoon suite. Soon people will leave here saying, what a great honeymoon we had and not, I think something bit my leg in the dark. You can't read the Yelp reviews. If I bit someone's like, they wouldn't think they'd know. Okay, come on. Now, A, the Yelp reviews is a good joke.

And that button about biting someone's like, this is what I like. This is why I, for example, am all in on this series. I'm haunted by one of those throwaway lines, though. There's a scene where Ben, the Skylar Jesano characters having ghost sex with his ghost girlfriend. And they're, like, writhing around on the floor. And Avedon says, I know nine easier ways to get bones. and I'm haunted because I can only come up with five. So I'm waiting for season two to find the other four.

Okay. Well, that is Haunted Hotel. We liked it. Some of us have issues with it, but I think we all would recommend at least checking it out. We want to know what you think when you do. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show.

Walter Chow, Jeff Yang. Thank you so much for being here. Such a pleasure. Always the best. And just a reminder that's signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show in public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free, so please go find out more at plos.n.npr.org slash happy hour,

or visit the link in our show notes. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janay Morris, and Mike Katz, and edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy, and how lockeman provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.