I feel like I have not done enough to convince others to watch School Spirits.
Like. It's a really clever show. The first season is REALLY CLEVER. The twists and turns the first season take feel earned to me. I felt clever when I guessed what would happen, and delighted when they fooled me.
The premise is that a high school girl, Maddie, wakes up having died in the school boiler room. She is ghost trapped on school grounds, along with a group of other students and at least 1 teacher who have died on school grounds over the life of the school. The problem is, she doesn't remember dying, and there's no body. The other ghosts remember how they died. Their bodies were found. But not Maddie.
So after squirming around about it trying to escape school grounds and flailing about how this isn't right, she gets to business and begins to investigate her own death. She follows her friends and family as they appear at the school. The other ghosts help her. The living cannot see them...... except Maddie is standing beside her best friend, Simon, a few days after she woke up here, looking out the same window as him... and the focus of his eyes go from staring out the window, to staring at her reflection in the window. And he turns, and he sees her.
And that's just in the first episode!!! I can't really go into the whole plot without giving away a lot of it, but there are so many threads woven together, and the characters are all fantastic.
The two on the left, Yuri and Charley, are dating and also I LOVE their individual arcs so much!! Charley is one of the younger ghosts in the school, having joined in the 90s after dying from anaphylaxis, and he has been stuck there watching the young boy he loved grow up and become a teacher at the school, unable to tell him everything he'd left unsaid. He's clever but also young in a lot of how he acts compared to the others, which is GREAT because even though they're all the same approximate age in looks, some of them have clearly been growing up more over time. Yuri is The Pottery Guy that everyone is convinced is Russian and speaks no English, because he minds his own business in the art room and never acknowledges what anyone says to him as if he understands. He is not Russian, he understands everyone. He just doesn't want to be included in the drama, which is the funniest thing to me when he just starts talking to them normally at one point to get them out of his hair, and IMMEDIATELY gets dragged in ass over teakettle.
I love them
Back to the group photo: The boy in green sitting on the floor is Xavier and he was Maddie's bf until she died and found out some stuff, but he takes responsibility for his actions and accepts that she is just a friend now, and a good one. The boy in red next to him is Simon, and he's in love with Maddie and also her best friend, and they would literally die for each other but also she's not interested in him like that as far as I can tell. Maddie is in the middle there, and the boy in grey behind her is Wally, a ghost she falls for that has some great character growth over the course of the seasons, I did NOT really care for him at the start but I would put claws in anyone trying to hurt him now. The girl on the couch beside Maddie is Nicole, Maddie's other best friend, and she goes through some Shit because Simon doesn't tell her about Maddie being dead and Nicole thinks she's just missing and is desperate to find her. The girl behind Nicole is Claire, Maddie's ex best friend who got involved with Xavier before Maddie died, and goes through So Much Shit and becomes Nicole's best friend, helping her start standing up for herself and Being Herself instead of being in Maddie's shadow like she was in S1.
For the group photo again: The girl in black standing beside Claire is Rhonda, another ghost and one of the oldest, who is so sick of being dead and way too traumatized to move on. Sitting in front of her is Quinn, who joins the group after S1 to help solve the riddle of the school after Rhonda yells at them to WAKE UP from the endless looping of a stuck ghost, and they end up falling for Rhonda afterward. And YES Quinn is explicitly nonbinary.
I mean c'mon, look at them please
And basically none of that is really plot, and that's not even all the characters!!! but listen I LOVE the characters. I love them. And the plot is worth not spoiling.
Y'all have trusted my recs before. I rarely rec something unless I'm really sure that others will love it if they give it a chance.
gracieabrams
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
