Courtesy of CBS

Ghosts is a great family TV series that mixes comedy and deep life lessons.

Me and my mom’s favorite Friday night TV show is Ghosts on CBS. The show is adapted from the original British BBC series, which I only watched a few episodes of because it felt unsettling. The U.S. one is a lot more lighthearted, while still having interesting characters and personalities.

In the show, a couple moves into an inherited old mansion that they decide to renovate and turn into a B&B. The woman, Sam, falls down the stairs and ends up in a coma. When she wakes up, she can see ghosts. She finds out that this mansion is filled with eight main ghosts, and finds more along the way, including a bunch of ghosts who live in the basement, who all died of cholera, and British soldiers in an outside shed who died in the Revolutionary War.

The show explores lots of different beliefs and myths about ghosts, like how they can make lights flicker, and why they are stuck on earth for a certain purpose, or in a specific location. The ghosts in this show all died on the mansion’s property and have been stuck there ever since. Some of these ghosts have been there for centuries, so being able to interact with Sam brings lots of new experiences and entertainment.

My favorite part is the characters’ distinct personalities and backgrounds, which honestly make the whole show. Since these characters lived in a wide range of time periods, they’re constantly learning new things and evolving. The biggest character growth I’ve seen throughout the 4 seasons is in the character, Hetty, who is Sam’s long-time ancestor and who built the mansion. She lived in the 1800s and originally believed in the traditional, oppressive roles of women of that time, but throughout her time as a ghost, she learned about the importance of standing up for her autonomy.

The expansive topics reach across generations, so my grandma, my mom, and I all enjoy it for various reasons. My grandma and I especially enjoy discussing the characters. Some other characters include a hippie named Flower, known for being spacey, distracted, and repeating old stories that she’s already told hundreds of times. She’s often underestimated because she tends to forget what’s happening in the middle of telling a story, but she proves the other characters wrong by sharing her deep knowledge every once in a while.

The ghosts also have powers, which they discover throughout the series. Their powers reflect their identities from when they were alive or from the causes of their deaths. For example, the character Alberta was a jazz singer, and living humans can hear her when she sings. Another character, Thorfinn, was a Viking who can control electricity because he died from getting struck by lightning.

The only downside to the show is that the scenes can be predictable since the characters often walk into cringeworthy or avoidable situations. However, the plot never stops getting more interesting, and I love seeing how the ghosts’ experiences change.