Ghosts Showrunners on Who Got Sucked Off and What's Ahead in Season 3

[Note: This interview contains details about the Season 3 premiere of Ghosts. Don’t boo-hoo if you’re reading this before watching.]

Rarely has the term “postmortem interview” carried as much weight as when Primetimer joined Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, the creators and showrunners of the CBS comedy Ghosts, to discuss the show’s third season premiere.

The topic wasn’t just about which character was dead. It was about the character who was now so dead that she was free from a purgatory of haunting the show’s central setting, a countryside estate known as Woodstone Mansion, because she had been “sucked off” to another plane. The premise was set up in a cliffhanger in the second season’s finale. And fan theories have abounded on message boards and social media. In fact, the mystery as to who was dearly departed was in such lock down that even the cast didn’t know the answer going into the finale.

But there was a big Easter egg in the Season 3 premiere episode’s title: “The Owl.” That narrowed the sleuthing to the lovebirds Thor (a deceased Viking played by Devan Chandler Long) and Flower (Sheila Carrasco’s perpetually high hippie), as they had connected over a mutual affinity for the bird of prey. And, as quickly established in the season premiere, Flower is no longer with us.

Wiseman says that they chose a main cast member because “we wanted it to be somewhat consequential” and “we ended Season 2 with the big cliffhanger and we didn't want to come back with a cop-out answer.” Below, Wiseman and Port talk more about Flower, ghost powers, and how a returning guest star in Season 3 could shake up some things.

Will we ever see Flower again?

Port: Well, we talked about it with [Carrasco] to give her a heads up that that was happening. We love Sheila. She's so funny. And we love Flower, which is one of the reasons we chose that character because we thought it would really … have major consequences and be something big that happened. This is a show that deals with life and death and afterlife and Earth and heaven and hell. It doesn't necessarily mean this is the last we'll ever see of her.

Wiseman: We still have eight ghost cast members on the show, and we have the ability to see ghosts not necessarily on this plane of existence. So that is possible [to see her again].

Carrasco recently had a baby. Did her pregnancy in any way affect this decision?

Port: That did make her unavailable for some time being, obviously. But that wasn't the only factor in this. It was mostly story reasons. We've had other seasons where ghosts are not around for several episodes, and we can work around that to some degree. But I think it did get us talking, to some degree. We had a number of different paths to go down [story-wise] and we thought this gave us a lot of consequences and gave us a lot of places to go. It's a very interesting season with a lot of twists and turns and I think it's gonna be really fun.

Were there conversations about other series regulars leaving?

Wiseman: We talked about a handful of different people and walked down that path to figure out what kind of stories that give us.

Port: In our version [of the show], getting sucked off has to do a little bit — and we haven't definitively said — with having reached some resolution or some major breakthrough occurring and, you know, so there were a number of ghosts that had reached that breakthrough toward the end of last season. So those were some primary candidates.

Not that I have anything against actor Asher Grodman, but it seemed like his finance bro ghost, Trevor, had tied up a lot of loose ends last season.

Wiseman: Well, they think that there's a correlation between breakthroughs and getting sucked off, but the truth is that it's a mystery and no one knows for sure if it's the same thing for everyone, or if it's random or whatnot.

So, I think in a good way, we had a number of ghosts that had breakthroughs and closure. You mentioned Trevor. Alberta [the Prohibition era-singer played by Danielle Pinnock] finally found out who her murderer was. Hetty [Rebecca Wisocky’s steely Gilded Age robber baroness] confessed to her role in that.

This episode’s title teased who might go. How long was that in the works?

Port: In an earlier episode, we had Thor and Flower bond over their shared love of owls when they were trying to prove to Stephanie, [the ghost of a 1980s teenager played by Odessa A'zion] that they had enough in common to warrant a relationship. We just thought that was funny at the time and then, when we decided to do this reincarnation story, we thought that it made the most sense in terms of what Thor would believe Flower would be reincarnated as. Stephanie’s not a ghost who is a series regular. Will we see more of her now that there’s one less regular ghost? And what about her new boyfriend, a ghost who died of cholera played by Tyler Alvarez?

Wiseman: Yes. They’ll be back this season. I think we’ve had Stephanie in one episode a season and she’ll be in one episode this season as well.

This season premiere also brought back Alex Boniello’s Crash, the decapitated 1950s greaser ghost, who doesn’t have a permanent storyline. Will he be sticking around more?

Wiseman: In my mind, we explain where he is by saying that he’s misplaced his head. He's not present as much as a lot of the other characters who live in the house. Part of that is a function of we just have a really big cast. We have a lot of people to serve us and whatnot.

Port: In our minds, there's a lot of goings-on on the property that we're not seeing week-to-week. There's other ghosts that we will meet eventually. Crash, if he’s off somewhere, he may be talking to somebody else at different times.

Wiseman: There’ll be areas of the property that we see this season that we haven't seen before.

Really? What can you say about that?

Wiseman: We’re building a restaurant, which is an ongoing storyline this year. And then the other ones are a little bit spoilery, so I can't really say.

Port: We are going to meet a couple new ghosts and learn a couple of our ghosts’ powers, as well as learn how one of our ghosts died.

Series star Rose McIver, who plays a living human who can see and speak to the deceased, was also pregnant this year. Her character, Sam, is also married to Utkarsh Ambudkar’s Jay, another alive human but one who cannot communicate with ghosts. Will this pregnancy factor into this season? Will Sam and Jay ever become parents?

Wiseman: Not this season. We're writing around it. Down the line, I think that could be something that they could definitely do. I think we've felt it was maybe just a little too early in the series to introduce such a big change. But it's definitely something that we would be open to and I think is a sort of a natural thing for them to do.

As far as ghost romances go, there was also some opposites-attract coupling between new money Trevor and old money Hetty. The rest of the household didn’t always support this union. What’s going on with those two lovebirds?

Port: Well, they've gone back into hiding as at the end of last season, and I think they might be putting the brakes on early this season, at least for a little while.

Trevor’s attempt to connect with the living last season caused Jay’s sister’s boyfriend Eric (Andrew Leeds) to have a near-death experience. Will he come back?

Port: Andrew Leeds is coming back.

Is it in the third episode since that’s titled “He Sees Dead People”?

Port: Yes.

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and two spoiled cats.