HBO launches Spanish-language comedy
How to summarize the breezy sensibility of “Los Espookys,” a new HBO comedy about a group of friends in an unnamed Latin American country who earn a living by staging fake horror events?
It is earnest, eccentric and casually surreal. It is also performed principally in Spanish, making it a rare HBO series that is delivered in a language other than English.
“Los Espookys,” which will make its debut on Friday, is created by Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres and Fred Armisen, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus who has also helped create the comedy shows “Documentary Now!” and “Portlandia.”
The new series, they said, is an attempt to pay homage to their Latin American roots, to ever-so-slightly expand the boundaries of what American viewers might watch and to transcend what they see as a double-standard in TV programming.
As Torres put it, “If a show’s in English, it’s meant to be consumed by the entire world. If a show is in any other language, then it’s just for those people.”
The comic spirit of “Los Espookys” might be offbeat, Torres said, but the language spoken by its characters should not be a barrier to anyone’s entry.
During his “SNL” tenure, Armisen wove in the occasional Spanish-language sketch, like the soapopera parody “Besos y Lagrimas,” and played characters inspired by Spanish TV. Some of these performances were tributes to his mother, who is Venezuelan, and the culture she exposed him to growing up.
Near the conclusion of his IFC sketch series “Portlandia” — another comedy show that presents an exaggerated depiction of an idiosyncratic locale — Armisen took a research trip to Mexico City. There he encountered a youth culture that was fascinated with Gothic fashion, horror movies, death metal and rockabilly music. He wanted to incorporate these ideas into his new show and even toyed with the idea of calling it “Mexico City (Only Good Things Happen).”
But that plan evolved as Armisen refined it with the help of Fabrega (who has appeared on “Portlandia” and “At Home With Amy Sedaris”) and Torres (a current writer for “SNL”).
Fabrega, who is of Panamanian descent, and Torres, who was born and raised in El Salvador, shared Armisen’s vision that the characters they played should all speak Spanish.
“Why would we shoot something and say we’re all Hispanic but no one is speaking Spanish?” Fabrega said.
Providing Englishlanguage subtitles, the creators felt, would
be enough for viewers to follow along.
The performers also shaped the characters they would play on “Los Espookys”: Fabrega cast herself as a trusting jack-ofall-trades named Tati. Torres plays Andres, the enigmatic heir to a chocolate confectioner’s fortune.
The “Los Espookys” team is rounded out by the levelheaded Ursula (played by Cassandra Ciangherotti) and Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), the team’s founder, who wears Gothic choker necklaces and mesh tops but has a good heart underneath. Armisen plays the role of Renaldo’s uncle, a virtuoso parking valet.
The initial specificity of the show’s setting became more ambiguous to reflect its mixture of different Latin American accents and traditions: a world where the mundane and the fantastic — a frustrated dental assistant, a haunted house, a multilevel marketing scheme and an ethereal spirit obsessed with the film “The King’s Speech” — can comfortably coexist. The initial sixepisode season of “Los Espookys” was shot in and around Santiago, Chile, although the show never says exactly where it takes place.
Lorne Michaels, who is an executive producer of “Los Espookys,” said the meticulousness of the universe in which the series occurs and all the elements it uses — including language — to create that universe will help it stand out.
“The normal thing you used to hear from networks was, how do you make it broader?” said Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” “But we don’t live in that world anymore. The audience is much more adventurous and open. People will find it, and none of it is too hard to understand.”