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Ghosts Is Low-Key the Sexiest Show on TV

It's rated TV-14, but It's got a grown-up sense of love and lust.
  • Sheila Carrasco, Danielle Pinnock, Asher Grodman, and Richie Moriarty. (Photo: Bertrand Calmeau/CBS)
    Sheila Carrasco, Danielle Pinnock, Asher Grodman, and Richie Moriarty. (Photo: Bertrand Calmeau/CBS)

    When it's not giving us hope for a polarized America, Ghosts is serving some of the sexiest stories on network TV, and it's not just because Trevor never wears pants. In almost every episode, CBS's supernatural sitcom finds room for romance or lust or, at the very least, a surprising joke about three-ways. However you like your love, it probably has you covered.

    Take the Season 2 premiere, which airs September 29. There's a storyline about Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones), the general from the American Revolution, trying to make his boyfriend Nigel (John Hartman), the British officer, feel comfortable wtih the rest of the ghosts on the property. Right away, the romantics among us can swoon over a charming couple who have finally found love.

    But if that's not your thing, then you can enjoy the episode's other storyline, about still-living protagonists Jay and Sam (Utkarsh Ambudkar and Rose McIver) trying to impress some finnicky guests at their B&B. That conflict partially hinges on how much Jay and Sam admire each other's cute butts. Unapologetic lust, coming through!

    That's not all. Later this season, there's a storyline about priggish Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) discovering some very private forms of pleasure, and there's a running thread about how Flower (Rebecca Carrasco) prefers to date multiple people at once. Meanwhile, Trevor (Asher Grodman) continues to ogle every woman he sees, Alberta (Danielle Pinnock) openly drools over hot visitors, and Sass (Román Zaragoza) sweetly pines for a ghost who lives a few miles away. 

    Honestly, Euphoria could never. Even though it's rated TV-14, meaning it will never drop an F-bomb or actually expose a butt that another character admires, Ghosts has more sexual and romantic variety than most series that are explicitly about those things. In fact, the family-friendly rating may even help, since it forces the writers to be more creative about how they express the characters' passions. If they could just show Trevor's backside or have Flower get graphic about her libidinous hippie past, they wouln't have to be nearly as clever.

    And that's part of the sexiness, too. When they're handled with wit and sparkle, stories about sex and love, even when they're about dead people, feel much more alive. 

    Ghosts airs on CBS Thursday nights at 8:30 PM ET, and it streams on Paramount+.

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    Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.

    TOPICS: Ghosts, CBS, Asher Grodman, Brandon Scott Jones, Danielle Pinnock, Devan Chandler Long, John Hartman, Richie Moriarty, Román Zaragoza, Rose McIver, Sheila Carrasco, Utkarsh Ambudkar