‘You can access emotions that most sitcoms couldn’t dream of’: Joe Wiseman on his hit show ‘Ghosts’

Since it first aired on CBS in October 2021, Ghosts has quickly become a breakout success, and has been renewed for a third season. When CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Nancy Giles caught up with the cast and crew, Joe Wiseman gave some great insight into the essence of the show.

When married couple Samantha and Jay inherit the beautiful Woodstone Estates, they leave their city life and careers behind with the dream of turning it into a Bed & Breakfast only to find that there are spirits inhabiting the residence from as far back as thousands of years. Samantha — played by Rose McIver — is the only one who can see and hear the band of dead misfits that includes Rebecca Wisocky as Hetty Woodstone, Devan Chandler Long as Thorfinn, Roman Zaragoza as Sasappis, Sheila Carrasco as Flower, Asher Grodman as Trevor, Richie Moriarty as Pete Martino, Danielle Pinnock as Alberta Haynes, and Brandon Scott Jones as Captain Isaac Higgintoot.

Played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, Jay can’t hear or see any of them, and that provides the show with a lot of fun to work with. Just like The Office was based on the British version, don’t get confused when Googling Ghosts to find another version that began in 2019. “The Joes” loved the premise and recreated an American version with American history. Joe Port and Joe Wiseman make up the Joes, the executive producers and showrunners who are having a great time exploring all the avenues that the show can take them on, which is growing with each new season of adventures.

Sitting with Nancy Giles, Joe Wiseman talked about how interesting the historical aspect of the show is, “I think part of the term of the show is being able to have all these different perspectives from history.”

Thor is a Viking who was left behind over a thousand years ago while Isaac was in the Revolutionary War. Hetty is Samantha’s great-great-great-aunt who built the mansion many years ago while Flower is a hippie from the ’60s. This is the fun of the show and that’s what the Joes saw in the British version, “They had such a fun premise and also a lot of heart. We wanted to — no pun intended — keep the spirit of the show.”

While it is a comedy, the show has a lot of heart because it has so much to play with, like the fact that Isaac eventually learns to come out as gay and Samantha watches her own mother become a ghost. Wiseman loves that aspect of the show, “Life and death is so much on the surface of all our stories that you can access emotions that most sitcoms couldn’t dream of.”

There is a good chance that season 3 will stay on schedule this Fall when it airs on CBS. In the meantime, catch up on the first two seasons streaming now on Hulu, Paramount Plus, and Prime.