Stream It Or Skip It: ‘School Spirits’ On Paramount+, Where A Teen Stalks Her School As A Ghost And Tries To Figure Out Who Killed Her

Ghosts trying to make contact with people in the living world is nothing new on TV; in fact, it’s been around since the medium’s early days (look up Topper to see exactly how long it’s been). It’s one of those genres that depends on two things: The “rules” by which the dead interact with the living world and the story that these spirits are in. In a new Paramount+ series, Peyton List plays a newly-dead teen who just wants to know what the hell happened to her.

SCHOOL SPIRITS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A bell rings. A teen is in the empty bleachers of the high school gym at Split Rock High School and she’s watching the crowd sitting on the gym floor.

The Gist: Maddie Nears (Peyton List) is watching the principal talking to students about a missing girl, and she’s annoyed at the lip service people are paying the girl when they didn’t know her really well. How does she know? Because the missing girl they’re looking for is Maddie. No one knows she’s there watching, because she’s dead.

She’s informed of this by a frosted-haired teen named Charley (Nick Pugliese). He apparently died at the high school in the ’90s, and his afterlife has been spent there ever since. Because she died at the high school, she’ll be there indefinitely until she “crosses over,” but that’s rarely happened.

Charley introduces Maddie to a “support group” that includes other dead students, like football player Wally Clark (Milo Manheim) and self-styled poet Rhonda (Sarah Yarkin). Not everyone takes part in the group, but the teacher who leads it, Mr. Martin (Josh Zuckerman) thinks it’s a way for the spirits to talk out the past so they can concentrate on the present and not get stuck forever at the school.

Unlike the other members of the group, Maddie has no idea how she died. She thinks back to the day it happened, three days prior. She sees her boyfriend Xavier Baxter (Spencer Macpherson) cut a class and sit in his truck; he claims it was because his phone was dead and it needed a charge. She wants to see an update of Carrie with best friend Simon Elroy (Kristian Flores). And with her mother Sandra (Maria Dizzia) sobering up, she has the house to herself, so she wants to throw a party with “all her friends,” i.e. Simon and their buddy Nicole Herrera (Kiara Pichardo).

As she goes around the school — she tries to leave the property but repeatedly finds herself back in the school’s boiler room, where she starts to see evidence of what happened to her — she sees Simon and Xavier at odds, especially when it’s discovered that Xavier has her phone. She finds out during a vigil for her that Xavier stole her phone to delete a text he sent to her by mistake, instead of head cheerleader Claire Zomer (Rainbow Wedell).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? School Spirits is like Ghosts, but less funny. Though there are funny moments, like Charley calling the men’s showers his “office.”

Our Take: Created by Megan Trinrud and Nate Trinrud, School Spirits does a good job of setting up Maddie’s ghostly situation without hammering the “rules” of it over our heads. “You can touch, but you can’t change anything in their world,” Charley tells Maddie.

It does seem that Charley is there at first to give her some guidance, and tell her why certain students, like the hippie chick who just sits on top of the lockers and giggles, or the band members that continually march in circles, don’t move on. But he can’t explain how people like him, who try to look forward, are stuck there for decades.

List, who is best known as Tory Nichols on Cobra Kai, plays Maddie as a combination of strong and independent, with a determination to bust the usual afterlife system to find out who killed her. Maddie is pissed, not scared; she’s frustrated that she can’t connect with anyone in the living world (at least not yet) and can’t leave the school’s premises. She has no time to contemplate that she’s dead and doomed to wander the halls of Split Rock indefinitely.

What we don’t understand is why the rest of the group aren’t more frustrated. They’ve all wandered these halls for decades, with no end in sight. They have no idea what it takes to get them to cross over, but they’ve seen it happen. So they seem to exist without any existential panic. Now, that’s something that may be revealed about Charley, Wally or some of the others over time, but it’s the only part of the first episode that was disconcerting to us. They all seem to do their time and attend the support group and just accept the fate they’ve been handed.

But that aspect of the show isn’t as significant as the mystery of how Maddie died and who was responsible for her death. And the mystery is set up well, with some clues and some misdirection given in the first episode. It’ll be intriguing to see how things change when the parameters of how Maddie interacts with the living world changes (see below).

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Simon, distraught over Maddie’s disappearance, tells a teacher that he knows her to well to think she ran. He looks out the window at the vigil for her. Maddie also looks out the window and says his name. Miraculously, Simon hears her.

Sleeper Star: Maria Dizzia plays Maddie’s mom Sandra, who comes to the school for the vigil, which confuses Maddie. Their relationship will likely be examined more in-depth via flashbacks (which we see via scenes shot in 4:3 format), and it’ll be interesting to see how it relates to Maddie’s death.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I can totally help you fill your holes,” Wally tells Maddie. He means the holes in her memory that surround her death. But of course, any chance for a cheap “fill your holes” death can’t be passed up, right?

Our Call: STREAM IT. We were pleasantly surprised by how mature of a show School Spirits was, not just because of List’s steady lead performance, but because it doesn’t delve in the current cliches that drag down most high-school dramas. In other words, no house parties and no sex scenes (yet); it’s just a fun, ghostly mystery to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.