‘Ghosts’ Is About to Officially “Change the World” With 1 Episode
Sam is a News Editor for Collider and a known lover of all things sci-fi and horror. She spends her days editing news stories, coodrinating exclusives, and working closely with writers to deliver their best work.
When she's not editing the daily news, she can be found hanging out with her wife (they're probably rewatching Ghosts for the millionth time), tweeting about romance, and cooking something delicious while belting to Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter's latest hits at the top of her lungs.
Sign in to your Collider account
If you tuned in last week for the return of Ghosts on CBS, you may have noticed that Season 6 looks a little different. After five years, series lead Rose McIver is taking a well-deserved break following the birth of her new baby. The show has conveniently sent her character, Sam, to Australia to film her holiday rom-com “Polar Opposites. In her stead, Ben Feldman’s Kyle has moved into the mansion full-time to look after the ghosts and help Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) run the B&B. While we’ll have to wait another month for the next holiday special, I recently sat down with Rebecca Wisocky and Asher Grodman, who play Hetty and Trevor respectively, for an episode of Collider Set Stories, and from the sound of it, Ghosts fans have plenty to look forward to in Season 6.
When asked how the ghosts and the cast are dealing with having Kyle/Ben around full-time, Wisocky laughed, “Oh, we're ruthless with Kyle, even more than Sam, I think. And I love the way Hetty objectifies him so shamelessly as well.” Despite the ghosts' unabashed, bratty behavior with their new living butler, Wisocky was quick to explain that Feldman and his character are “a wonderful addition to the family.” While no one can replace the rom-com dynamic between Sam and Jay, Wisocky has enjoyed watching Feldman and Ambudkar find their own rhythm together in Season 6. “It's really cool to have the two dads attempt to be in charge while we're running ragged all over both of them. It's been a lot of fun,” said Wisocky. “We miss Rose so much, but Ben is a great guy and so good at his job. It's been kind of seamless.”
Answering the same question, Grodman joked that “Ben's a lot to handle. He's a bit of a monster,” before confirming that in reality “he's lovely.” While Feldman has big shoes to fill after five years of McIver setting the tone and leading the cast, Grodman says he “does it beautifully, and he's so funny, and just such a great teammate. And he's smart; he has a great sense of humor. He brings in this fresh energy. It’s like having a new kid at school. It's just fun.” Having Feldman around has also renewed the energy on set, as Grodman explained, “We’re also all so used to the rhythms of this, it's exciting to have a new perspective in the kitchen with us.”
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
‘Ghosts’ Season 6 Wouldn’t Be Possible Without the Crew
While Feldman’s presence has certainly spiced things up for Ghosts, he’s joining an ensemble that knows it takes a village to make a television show truly come to life. Beyond the wonderfully talented cast, Ghosts is created by a massive team of artists and craftspeople. When asked about the people we never see on screen who make her job 100 times easier, Wisocky had plenty to say about the show’s fantastic crew in Montréal. “Carmen Alie and her entire team in the costume department, most especially my dresser, Sophie Godard, are superheroes. […] Zoë Sakellaropoulo is one of the finest production designers working in the business, and if nothing else, she should have received an Emmy nomination by now,” Wisocky told Collider. She continued, shouting out the show’s Director of Photography Michel St-Martin, calling him “a genius, [who makes] our show look like a movie.”
Wisocky also noted that while we’ve heard the Ghosts cast talk about being one big happy family, they really do love each other that much, and that love extends to the crew. “It extends beyond another 250 people that surround us that we work with every day, largely led also by the AD department, the assistant directors who keep our shit together and deal with sometimes impossible circumstances with schedule changes and sometimes late scripts and people becoming unavailable or people being sick. What they manage to do is an art form in and of itself,” she told Collider. She went on to name some of the most essential team members bringing Ghosts to life, saying:
“Our head of the AD department is a woman named Laurence Mercier, and we would be sunk without her. And our 1st AD is Matt Jemus; we would be sunk without him. We have a script supervisor named Jess Lee who gets to direct this season; we just finished the episode that she directed, and it's so wonderful that she's been promoted from within. She's our first Canadian director on the show as well! She did an excellent job. There's a woman named Gloria Cool, who takes care of all the ghost babies, all the ghost muppets, gets us coffee, and makes sure that we know where we're going, and she's invaluable. Saying [she gets] us coffee makes it sound like such a small job, but it's not; she completely holds all of us together in so many ways. She's invaluable.
There are so many people. We love them all: the camera department, the sound department. I mean, it's a very intimate relationship doing this together with 250 people, and it requires that everyone really give a damn and be really good at their job, both individually and together as an ensemble. And they really are; we are very lucky. Every single one of them deserves a shout-out, and they know that. They know how much we love them and value them too.”
‘Ghosts’ Is Officially Raising the Stakes for Season 6’s Christmas Special
Earlier this year at Ghosts' San Diego Comic-Con panel — hosted by Collider’s Perri Nemiroff — co-showrunner Joe Wiseman confirmed that the upcoming annual Christmas special would be a riff on Die Hard after referencing It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol last season. Speaking about what to expect from the next two episodes ahead of the show’s weekly return in 2027, Wisocky said, “Utkarsh looks really buff; [he] managed to turn it into a tank top moment that’s for sure.” Both Wisocky and Grodman confirmed that the episode is “very high stakes,” with Wisocky saying, “lots of people are in peril. The stakes are perhaps the highest that they have ever been. And I don't say that lightly.”
Grodman told Collider, “When I heard we were doing Die Hard, I was like, ‘Well, that sounds like Trevor's gonna be involved in that.’ And he is, and he is both an agent of solutions and absolute chaos.” What kind of chaos ensues remains to be seen, but Wisocky teased that “there will be something that happens that completely changes the world. That sounds like something general. I can't get more specific, but it's true.” Continuing, she hinted that “there's an opportunity for one of the ghosts to go to town with a special skill that is really enjoyable and was very enjoyable to all of us. There's a claustrophobic aspect to some of it. It's very action-packed.”
Shouting out the show’s incredibly talented crew once more, Wisocky had high praise for Alie and Sakellaropoulo’s work on the special, and especially St-Martin’s work as the DP. “I think our show looks like a film. And that is largely because of his photography. He and his whole team are really remarkable artists, but he's one of the best DPs I've ever worked with. So big, big shout out to him, and there's a lot more fun stuff that he gets to do as a DP, given the fact that this is kind of an action-packed episode,” said Wisocky. Grodman meanwhile, also had some lovely things to say about his co-stars, saying, “It's a very talented cast, and some people in this cast really get to flex some muscles in that episode and get to do a lot of transforming.” While both stars remained tight-lipped on the impending ghost-on-ghost possession that Wiseman also revealed at SDCC, Grodman did confirm that having Kyle around may finally give Trevor someone to celebrate Hanukkah with. “There is a little bit of Hanukkah in the episode. And yes, there is a Trevor/Kyle connection, and it's a fun one. I'll leave it at that.”
‘Ghosts’ Will Officially Cross the 100th Episode Milestone in Season 6
While we’ll only have the two holiday specials to get fans through the end of 2026, Ghosts will return full-time in early 2027 and, with Season 6, Episode 6, will mark the 100th episode of the show’s tenure on CBS. At New York Comic-Con, Wiseman and the cast revealed that not only would the episode see the ghosts’ favorite reality show, “It’s Getting Hot in Here,” coming to film at the mansion, but that the episode would include appearances from Survivor alum Parvati Shallow as the host, and returning favorite Matt Walsh as Hetty’s demonic ex-husband, Elias. When Wisocky found out Shallow would be part of the episode, she was overjoyed as a Survivor fan. “I'm a big Survivor head, as you know. I was so thrilled to do those Survivor promos [in 2024]. And so when I heard that Parvati was coming, I was so excited. She had a lot of fun, and she was very indulgent with my bajillion questions that I asked about Survivor and how it works.”
Teasing the return of Elias, who typically shows up at least once a season to throw a wrench in the world of Woodstone and sow havoc amongst the living and the dead, Wisocky said, “The fact that, of course, horrible, horrible Elias is going to be there to rain on our parade. He throws a stick in the works, of course, but it was fun.” Continuing, she told Collider: “I think it's very cool. It's very meta that it's a show about TV, and it's our 100th episode, and it just highlights that our [the ghosts] favorite show is just so very lowbrow, but we treat it like such high art. I mean, the stakes for us with that show are very high, for Thor, especially. Devan Chandler Long has a very, very funny episode for the 100th with his relationship to the making of this reality show. It was a lot of fun.”
Ghosts will return for a 1-hour Christmas special on December 10, followed by a mid-season premiere for the rest of Season 6 in 2027. Stay tuned at Collider for more, and check out our full episode of Set Stories with Grodman and Wisocky below.
- Release Date
- October 7, 2021
- Network
- CBS
- Directors
- Christine Gernon, Jaime Eliezer Karas, Katie Locke O'Brien, Nick Wong, Jude Weng, Pete Chatmon, Richie Keen, Alex Hardcastle, Kimmy Gatewood, Matthew A. Cherry, Cortney Carrillo
- Writers
- Emily Schmidt, John Timothy, Lauren Bridges, Sophia Lear, Guy Endore-Kaiser, Rishi Chitkara, Julia Harter, Skander Halim, Zora Bikangaga
-
Rose McIver
Samantha Arondekar
-
Utkarsh Ambudkar
Jay Arondekar
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.