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Ghosts: BBC vs CBS

It’s been almost a month since I finished BBC’s Ghosts, and I cannot stop thinking about it. It has quickly become one of my favourite TV shows. I watched the US-American version first because it had been plaguing my TikTok FYP. It was a fine show, but it didn’t have the grip the BBC version currently has on me.

This is an exploration of why I found UK Ghosts to be a much more compelling story than US Ghosts, even if they are “the same show”.

DISCLAIMER: There will be spoilers for both shows.

The Main Couple

Underappreciated in both shows, let’s begin with the two livings: Alison and Mike, and Sam and Jay.

Sam and Jay feel, to me, like they just spawned at the beginning of the show. They aren’t people, with lives before the fragments we see, which will continue after the show ends. Sam is the biggest offender of the two. Where are her friends from before she moved to Woodstone Manor? I would understand if she didn’t have any friends over, and we also have to consider that the US is massive compared to the UK, and her friends might live on the other side of the country. But not one call? No facetime? Not even one text message? And let me be clear: I don’t want this to be a show about her living friends, and I don’t need them to be characters in the show, but do Sam and Jay have to be completely cut off from the real world?

Alison and Mike, on the other hand, have a friend group, and when these friends play a role in an episode, the focus is still on the ghosts’ reactions. They don’t distract from the main characters, while still making Alison and Mike feel more grounded in reality.

Character moments vs. cheap jokes

I’m not the first person to point this out, and I certainly won’t be the last, but it’s still worth saying: why would you change a ghost’s powers from Mary reliving the moment of her death, being “burned at the stake” again, and subsequently making the living people that have passed through her smell the burning of the fire that killed her, to a fart joke. Isaac’s life/death is tragic, but his ghost power being “fart” get’s really exhausting really quickly.

Ghost lore

Expanding on ghost powers, let’s talk about the other ghosts. This point, I realise, is less black and white and more about personal preference rather than bad writing. I like that Ghosts (UK) doesn’t always directly answer the viewer’s questions about the afterlife. Some ghosts have powers, and some don’t and the ones that don’t aren’t searching for them. Mary gets “sucked off” but we don’t know what comes next.

In the US version, however, there is explicitly a hell and a heaven, and Elias comes back from hell to tell us what happens there.

That is one of the many charms of the UK version, the uncertainty. What comes next? I don’t want to know.

I also think it helps the emotional punch of Mary’s death (re-death, moving on? idk) land better. If one of the CBS ghosts were to die, the grieving wouldn’t be as devastating, because we know what comes next, and how could we be sad when a character has, certainly, gone to heaven? It could still be made into an interesting episode, maybe exploring the other ghosts’ (especially the older ones) jealousy, who also want to get “sucked off”. Still, I much prefer the uncertainty of Mary’s death (would also very much like to see a main character from the US version move on, just because I would like to see how they handle it when it isn’t a fake out like with Flower).

Found family vs. pair the spares

CBS’s Ghosts has an obsession with romance, to the point where it is quite frankly absurd.

You know when in a fandom there is a four-person friend group (or other even number) and two of those characters are in a really popular ship, so the fandom decides to ship the other two characters together as if they couldn’t be happily single, or aromantic, or whatever? (Author’s note: yes, aromantic people can still date, doesn’t take away from my point.) Yeah, I feel like that watching CBS’s Ghosts. Some characters are single, but I still think there is too much of a focus on romance/sex, with Flower and Thor, Isaac and Nigel, Hetty and Trevor, Pete and Alberta/Donna since he discovered his ghost power, and I’m sure when the series is over I will have more examples. Maybe, if these couples had more chemistry and were properly set up, I wouldn’t be so hard on them, but my point still stands.

Both shows try to pull off the found family angle, but only one of them succeeds. You can’t call it a found family if your only “family dynamic” is “romantic relationship”, that’s just a regular friend group. The Captain and Kitty’s father-daughter relationship is one of my favourite things about the original, and I also love Julian being a sort of mentor to Alison in all things scheming. It can even be played for laughs, with Robin being the “family dog”. None of this charm is carried over to the US-American version, and I really, really wish it was, because it has made me fall in love with the BBC’s version.

Pacing

You know, for a show with 20-ish episodes per season instead of six, you’d think they could take more than an episode to develop a storyline properly. Let’s take a closer look at two storylines that appear in both shows.

Firstly, the one with Alison’s/Sam’s long-lost sister. In the BBC’s version, this is a season-long arch, and it is not solely centred around uncovering whether she is lying, but also discussing Kitty’s jealousy and possessiveness over Alison; and Alison’s deep desire for a family, and how the ghosts have become that for her. And, generally, it makes you believe that Alison would believe the lie, and wouldn’t see the holes in the story, because she just really wanted a sister. Sam’s story plays almost the same but is reduced to a single episode. I know it is the classic sitcom formula, things must return to the status quo by the end of the episode. Still, I wish it wasn’t so rushed.

Secondly, the Captain(s) coming out. In both shows, the queerness of these characters is very obvious, but in the UK version, coming to terms with his queerness and learning to express his feelings is the core of his character. However, the US version takes this in another direction, placing more importance on the budding relationship between Isaac and Nigel (see: my point about this version’s obsession with romance). The UK version is hardly subtle, but compared to the US version… I wouldn’t be so angry if they hadn’t decided to undo their development by having Isaac leave Nigel at the altar.

Bad people vs. bad characters

This discussion should extend beyond Ghosts and into literature/art in general. To quote Oscar Wilde, “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” A character being a bad person doesn’t mean they are a bad character, those two qualities can coexist, but don’t always come together. CBS’s Ghosts seems wary of making any of the characters bad people. BBC’s Ghosts doesn’t have this problem. Julian (the equivalent to Trevor in the CBS version) is a bad person, especially at the beginning of the show. And he is probably my favourite character. He died of a heart attack while cheating on his wife, he didn’t bother to take care of his daughter and he attempted to kill Alison, which ultimately resulted in her being able to see ghosts. He is not nice, and the show doesn’t want you to think that. And you watch him grow throughout the series and it is great.

None of the characters in the US version are bad. This is mostly just a pet peeve of mine, but I do think it makes things much more static. Everyone in this version is just too nice. And too excited about everything. Why is Sam so onboard with the ghosts? Why is she never annoyed with them? And why do they never talk over each other? Do they never get tired of each other? I mean, some of them have been “living” together for centuries!

This topic in particular is something I want to write about more extensively, looking at other shows and fandom perception and that kind of stuff, so I’m going to cut myself here.

Conclusion

I don’t think that CBS’s Ghosts is, like, the worst show ever, it just doesn’t live up to its predecessor. That was just, from my point of view, a really high bar. There is one thing I think it does better than its BBC counterpart, and that is Jay’s relationship with the Ghosts (as opposed to Mike’s), which is to say, he actually has one.

So, yes, CBC’s Ghosts has lots of issues that may come from adapting the story for an American audience, or may just be lousy writing. Either way, I still enjoy it, although the episodes are definitely harder to get through.