‘School Spirits’ Season 3 (Review)

Three years ago, I was sent screeners of a show called School Spirits by Paramount: a murder mystery from the perspective of the victim’s ghost. While I don’t recall much of that time period, I do recall how devastating the show’s first episode was. Kristian Ventura’s vulnerable performance as Simon, a grieving teenager who realizes he can talk to his friend’s ghost, may be on par with the emotional gut punch from, “He can’t see without his glasses,” for me.

School Spirits could have taken a metaphysical approach to it, where Simon was able to talk to Maddie (Peyton List) to help her find closure. I would have been in for that, because of how solid Ventura’s performance was. Instead, showrunners Megan and Nate Trinud wanted to use the setting of high school as an eternal purgatory to explore a thrilling supernatural story that puts its own twists on the afterlife.

Artfully stylized, School Spirits understands the medium of television with precision, and – three seasons in – it’s allowing its well-crafted visual language to enhance the narrative.

Without recapping the first and second seasons, which this review will discuss openly, Season 3 picks up in the immediate aftermath of Maddie’s return to her body. This is a moment we’ve been waiting three years for that intentionally feels unearned because, out of everyone, Simon isn’t there. He’s in a space between life and death, body and all, and the directive of the season being to save him works wonders for the storytelling possibilities.

While I have only seen the first three episodes, how that development is used in those episodes leaves the characters in some of their most tense situations yet.

The show’s primary antagonist for Season 3 is a superintendent, played by Jennifer Tilly, whose mission is to close down Split River High due to the intense aftermath of Maddie’s apparent disappearance. For the brief minutes we saw her, Tilly’s performance was solid, though it felt a little stunt-y. School Spirits doesn’t classify itself as a horror show, it’s more of a supernatural fantasy drama.

While the Scars from Season 2 did shift that a bit more towards the horror side of things, the overall narrative didn’t, so Tilly’s casting feels like an unearned nod to fans of horror when the show doesn’t position its storylines as such.

Speaking of storylines, Season 3 sees Maddie in her body for the first time in months. The show cleverly kept Maddie/Janet out of the school last season, and that reluctance paid off. There are moments in Season 3 that are anxiety-inducing, with the show taking a while to answer the question of whether Maddie is able to talk to the ghosts, so the audience is left wondering how Maddie’s going to deal by herself.

School Spirits‘ biggest flaw is failing to balance its cast, which grows each season. This season has Rhonda (Sarah Yarkin) try and uncover a mystery surrounding Quinn (Ci Hang Ma), while Yuri (Miles Elliot) and Charley (Nick Pugliese) grow closer together amidst some odd behavior from Yuri. The show at least doesn’t labor on these storylines too long, and by the end of Episode 3 they’re either resolved or close to being resolved, but failing to embed these characters into the narrative for the season undercuts their value to the story.

Things are lighter on the human side, with Nicole (Kiara Pichardo) and Claire (Rainbow Wedell) trying to explain Simon’s sudden disappearance. Maddie’s mom, Sandra (Maria Dizzia), started drinking again, which provides extremely fertile ground for List and Dizzia to sell their mother-daughter relationship – which they do. This came at the right moment; any later and it would’ve been hard to buy them together, and any earlier would’ve made Sandra another point of tragedy in Maddie’s story that could have come across as cheap. Having the tragedy dimension to Maddie’s disappearance come in the form of a grieving best friend was the single best decision the show made. Not just because it gave audiences a new on-screen perspective to explore teen dramas (a grieving teenage boy), but also because it let that teenage boy become one of the strongest characters in the show, more than capable of carrying a season on its back.

Kristian Ventura is a genuine acting powerhouse, and Simon getting to explore this side of the afterlife feels like the show rewarding him. There’s a lot that happens here that I can’t spoil, but I can say that the show doesn’t change up its visual language all that much to depict Simon in these scenes. He gets to interact with the ghosts, finally able to put faces to names, which is the best kind of fan-service because it further strengthens the mythology while giving viewers a satisfaction they never knew they needed. For the three episodes I watched, the show wasn’t too intent on answering a lot of the questions those scenes bring up, but it does seem to want to begin answering them by Episode 4.

Things “seeming” like they want to happen is perhaps my biggest gripe with this season. There’s a lot of great stuff that, in a vacuum, would be fantastic because it was a season’s-worth of great stuff. But, you’re aware by now of the context.

If Season 3 kept putting the ghosts on irrelevant side quests, I worry about how much longer I’d care about them. Or, if it continued to deliver two lore/mythology storylines without answering anything, I’d be concerned that all the answers would only come in the finale. I think the episodes I watched are good, but I wonder how School Spirits will propel the storyline meaningfully forward, nudging towards an ending.

Season 3 is clearly the show at its most ambitious, and it’s built up enough goodwill for audiences to believe it can pull it off. Whether it will… Signs Point To Yes.

THE FIRST EPISODE OF SCHOOL SPIRITS (SEASON 3) IS NOW STREAMING ON PARAMOUNT+. CHECK OUT THE TRAILER BELOW.