GHOSTS EPs Joe Wiseman and Joe Port on Their Strategy for Revealing the Ghost Rules

Throughout the first season of the delightful CBS comedy GHOSTS, the writers have slowly revealed the backstory of the non-living characters inhabiting Woodstone Mansion—and also sharing the limitations to their life after death.

But with so many rules in play (be it possession or the ability to interact with physical objects), how many of these were plotted from the start versus being set as they come up?

“Since it’s based on another show, there were already a number of rules that were already in place,” executive producer Joe Wiseman said during a recent panel to promote the comedy. “But one of the things I most enjoy in the writers’ room is sort of bringing up rules—and some things we don’t have an answer for. We have a joke…’Why can we walk through walls, but we don’t fall through the floor?’ And stuff like that. We can have hour-long discussions about what the possibilities of that is. I personally love all sorts of stuff.”

When the show returns in 2022, “we discover there’s a material that the ghosts cannot pass through,” Wiseman says. “That was a fun new rule. We like to expand the mythology of the ghosts. And on set we have all sorts of debates about that: ‘Can they lean on furniture? Can they sit down?'”

“It’s a big part of the show, because we want to be consistent,” he continues. “But we also want to push the limits and find out where the rules bend and where they don’t bend.”

But thanks to the comedy’s success, they also have a bit more wiggle room about when and how they share the ghost power quirks.

“We like to reveal things slowly,” executive producer Joe Port said. “In the original pilot, we had a line about what Flower’s power was. And we ended up cutting it, which I thought was so great, because…in that ‘Possession’ episode, which I thought just turned out so well, we got to learn at a very opportune time that when she walks through people, they get super happy. And that’s what happened to Enrico Colantoni, who was so great in the episode. It’s just sort of fun to kind of drip these things out slowly as we move forward.”

Miss a moment of GHOSTS? CBS is running a five-episode marathon on Thursday, December 23, kicking off at 8:31/7:31c. 

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• GHOSTS Post-Mortem: Richie Moriarty Breaks Down the ‘Pete’s Wife’ Reveals
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• CBS Orders Full Season of GHOSTS
• GHOSTS: What You Need to Know About the Series Premiere

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