“Melf loves cookies and spaghetti!” – Melf
Fantasmas is one of the most difficult shows to explain that I’ve ever watched. I can’t even imagine what the pitch to HBO and/or Max executives must have been like for this thing.
At turns funny, dark, whimsical, surreal, and even occasionally uplifting, Fantasmas never lets you forget how deeply eclectic and downright strange it is throughout.
I’m not even sure it makes sense to recount “what happened in the episode,” which is after all the bread-and-butter of television recaps and reviews.
Since the plot of “Cookies and Spaghetti” is non-linear (I’m tempted to write very non-linear, but I’m not sure if it makes sense to call out degrees on non-linear-ness?), I’ll start with a few of the set pieces of the episode.
I kind of fell in love with Fantasmas briefly during a chunk of the episode where we essentially view a completely bonkers and unhinged television sitcom within the world of the show called Melf.
The vibe of Melf is incredibly cheesy family comedy fare – think Alf circa the 1980s – but. The but is the bonkers and unhinged part. Let’s just say that Paul Dano as the sitcom dad and Melf the puppet/alien/thing form another planet form a Very (Very) Special Bond that spans generations.
During another chunk of the episode, we spend time with Steve Buscemi as an aging, struggling avant garde/punk artist and busker named Q. Buscemi is incredible in everything, which means he’s incredible here. I enjoyed learning about his character for a few minutes, but like most things going on in Fantasmas, we float in and out of stories in some dreamlike state, so it became difficult to fully get invested in his story.
If there’s a throughline to the show, it’s the doings of Julio (series creator and star Julio Torres, who is also the writer/director/star of Los Espookys) that sort of stitch together these dreamlike asides and oddball fantasies.
At one point, we see Julio pitching a crayon company (I think?) on creating a “clear crayon.”
“To color something clear is to reimagine coloring as we know it,” Julio says. He proposes naming the crayon Fantasmas, “which means ghosts.”
Later in the episode, Julio talks about how he can feel the inner lives of shapes and numbers and letters, which leads us into the story of Q, played by Buscemi.
There’s a lot of other stuff going on: a cab driver named Chester (Tomas Matos), a robot assistant named Bibo, a storyline involving Julio losing an oyster, another involving a schoolteacher who struggles to connect with her students who also has an annoyed husband who didn’t get some promotion, but…
It all fades away and morphs, shifts, and flips on its head again and again. Like dreaming.
Some of it is rather pleasant and delightful, and I laughed out loud a few times, but by the end of the half hour I was more than ready to wake up and move on to something else.