“You have to laugh sometimes to deal with pain,” School Spirits showrunner and executive producer Oliver Goldstick said about the new young adult series that premieres today on Paramount+. The series follows a recently deceased teenager who discovers that her school is haunted by students of the past who also met their untimely end on campus. And as morbid as that my sound, there’s a lot of humor and life to be found in this show about the afterlife, as evidenced by a panel during a recent TCA press tour. “It's the absurdity of being in a situation where you're trapped. And when I showed it to my kids, they plugged into it immediately because of the outrageousness that the metaphor worked. Tone-wise, we are not shying away from heavier subject matter.”
(Randy Shropshire/Getty Images/Paramount+)
“My twin brother's an actor and he read the script,” Peyton List revealed, who stars as Maddie, a present-day high school student who dies unexpectedly. Unlike the ghost community she finds in the afterlife, Maddie has no memories of her death and a mystery unfolds. “I did have a couple people come up to me at parties and be like, ‘Oh, so you're doing a ghost show. You're going to be playing a ghost.’ And I just didn't really think of it as a ghost or a supernatural story, because they kept it so grounded and I just feel like the whole tone of it was pretty grounded. And that's also thanks to our initial director, Max Winkler. He's so incredible and just so grounded of a person… I went about it from just an angsty teen mystery. And I love romance myself, so I like the relationship aspects of all of it. ”
“We wanted to focus on emotional mysteries, on the kinds of things that haunt individuals rather than society,” shared Nick Pugliese, who plays Maddie’s new ghost friend Charlie. “In a lot of ways, it really is about each of these people, these ghosts and our living characters, and what they're all going through in this space, less so about more hot topic issues.” Landing the role of Charlie was a big deal for Nick, and one that was curiously similar to his lone previous screen credit. “This is really only my second thing that I've ever done, and the other thing is this indie film where I played a closeted gay kid in 1994. And Charley died in 1994. So, for that, I was sent this whole packet of all these different things to refer to.” Even though Charley died in the 1990’s he has experienced the continuing passage of time at the school.
“My character, Wally, talks about a lot of his favorite movies,” revealed Milo Manheim, whose character is a jock from the ‘80s. “I made sure to watch all those. Also, before I got to Vancouver, which is where we shot, I made a super-long Wally playlist that was solely what I was listening to up there, just walking down the street, just to get the feel of it.” It was a fun education on a period of time Milo didn’t live through. “I had so many moments where I was, like, I am so happy you guys wrote him as an '80s jock, because I love that decade. And also just watching old movies, and watching I tried to have a bounce in my walk, like I came from the '80s. I tried to bring some '80s physicality to the character. And that was really fun to explore for me.”
School Spirits is the brainchild of siblings Nate and Megan Trinrud, who began work on it as a graphic novel and sold the concept as a series before the first volume was published (it’s scheduled to be released this fall). “We sold it in 2020 and wrote it that same year, but we sort of had the idea for a long time,” Nate revealed. “It was originally a pilot script that we then converted to a manuscript to sell as a graphic novel, and then it came back to TV.” The idea had been germinating since around 2018, inspired by Nate and Megan’s own high school experiences in a building with history that dated back nearly 100 years. But the themes they were writing took on new meaning when the pandemic hit. “It feels like we've been removed from our lives in a way and that we're outside of them and how do we get back to how we were, I think, is a big question we all ask, and that's certainly what the show's about.”
“We've always gotten along as siblings; we're best friends,” Megan Trinrud concluded. During their high school years, Megan and Nate had to contend with an alcoholic parent, which found its way into School Spirits. “We really helped each other through that time. And this process, this project helped. But so much of what we wanted to share, too, was that feeling of community, finding someone you can confide in and work closely with who helps you find your way; you don't always have to do it alone. That was really true to our experience, and so it's really built into the story as well, this sort of group of ghosts that [Maddie] gets to know in the school.”
Meet Maddie and her new friends in School Spirits. The first three episodes are now streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes launching on Thursdays.
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