The current top 10 list on Netflix may begin with Black Rabbit, Doc, Billionaire’s Bunker and Mafia: Most Wanted, but when you get to #5, that would be the best new show on Netflix.
It’s called Haunted Hotel, and as it stands, has a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The series is an animated production created by Matt Roller, who has been a writer on Rick and Morty, now landing his own series that debuted on Netflix this past week, no easy feat. What’s’ it about? Here’s the synopsis of Haunted Hotel:
“Katherine, along with her children Ben and Esther, move into the Undervale Hotel, which was owned by her deceased brother Nathan. However, it is soon revealed that the place is haunted by the quirky restless spirits of the previous residents, including Nathan, who offers to help Katherine make the hotel’s business successful. They later meet an immortal demon named Abaddon, who is trapped in the body of a young boy from the 1700s and offers to help the family fend off evil demons, murderers and other entities who come to Undervale.”
The show has a very solid voice cast, which includes Will Forte (The Last Man on Earth), Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings), Skyler Gisondo (Superman), Natalie Palamides (Wild Life) and Jimmi Simpson (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). The ten-episode series is an easy watch at just 25 minutes a piece, easy to spread over the course of a week or weekend.
The critic score is a bit lower, a 73%. If we’re not counting action/video game animes on Netflix like Arcane or Castlevania, That’s lower than the likes of BoJack Horseman (93%) or Big Mouth (95%). It’s more along the lines of Disenchantment (67%), but that show ran for five full seasons, so I imagine that Haunted Hotel doesn’t have all that high of a bar to meet. And debuting at #5 on the Top 10 list with a lot of other big-name competition is pretty good.
I’d say it’s a good time to pick this up, given that most of the rest of the top new shows on Netflix are a bit underwhelming right now. It’s easily the best new one, if we’re not counting say, the new season of Wednesday which has now slid down the list after everyone has finished it. Or you can just watch KPop Demon Hunters for the millionth time, which is what millions of people are doing, given that it’s still #1 on the service more than three months after release. That will never stop being ridiculous. Anyway, Haunted Hotel is live now.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.