The Pitch
"Los Espookys" is a Spanish-language HBO comedy created by Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, and Fred Armisen. Renaldo is a horror-obsessed twentysomething in an unnamed Latin American country who turns his hobby into a small business: staging fake supernatural events for clients who need one. His crew is Andrés, a chocolate heir with a mysterious dark inheritance; Úrsula, a dental assistant who wants out; and her sister Tati, who takes every side job the universe offers her. Armisen floats in as Renaldo's uncle Tico, a valet parker in LA. Early episodes set up the crew and their first jobs: a priest who needs an exorcism, an American ambassador's daughter, a mermaid.
What Works
The voice. Julio Torres writes like nobody else on television, and if you've seen his standup or "Problemista," you know the register: deadpan, absurd, quietly sad, obsessed with objects and small indignities. Ana Fabrega's Tati is one of the great comic characters of the last decade, a woman who takes a job as a "human alarm clock" with total professional pride. Bernardo Velasco gives Renaldo a real sweetness underneath the horror-kid affect. Cassandra Ciangherotti plays Úrsula's exhaustion like an actual person's exhaustion. The show's world is stuffed with jokes that don't announce themselves. Backgrounds pay off. Signage pays off. A demon shows up and behaves like a coworker. It's shot beautifully by Fernando Frías de la Parra ("I'm No Longer Here") for a chunk of season two, and the production design does a lot with color and cheap-looking practical effects on purpose.
The Case Against
Torres's sensibility is aggressively specific, and if it doesn't click in the first twenty minutes, it won't click in the twentieth hour. Pacing is loose on purpose. Scenes end when a joke lands, not when a plot beat completes. Some viewers want propulsion; this show wants to hang out. The Armisen subplot in LA can feel like a separate program stapled on. And there are only twelve episodes total because Zaslav's HBO Max killed it before Torres and Fabrega could land the plane, so anyone who needs resolution should know that going in.
Who This Is Actually For
People who liked "At Home with Amy Sedaris," "Documentary Now!," "The Other Two," or anything Quinta Brunson and Torres have touched. If "Nathan For You" hits your sweet spot because the world plays it straight while one weirdo runs a scheme, this is the softer, warmer cousin. If you need a season arc with stakes and a cliffhanger every week, you'll be checking your phone by episode two.
The Bottom Line
It's WORTH IT because the writing has a point of view and the performances trust the writing. Torres and Fabrega aren't lecturing about anything. They're building a small, weird economy of people doing jobs, and the jokes come out of who those people are, not out of what the show wants you to think about them. The craft is the argument. Twelve episodes, cancelled too soon, funnier than most half-hours on any platform. Watch it.