Ghosts Season 2 Episode 2 Review: Alberta’s Podcast

Any chance to amplify Alberta’s voice should be celebrated, but Ghosts Season 2 Episode 2, “Alberta’s Podcast,” is particularly triumphant.

This follow-up performance crackles and fizzes with a star power worthy of our favorite flapper.

It’s the perfect chance for Ghosts to take on a comedic caper, complete with speakeasy flashbacks, onstage performances, and lots of gasp-worthy treachery. Indeed, this episode is the bee’s knees!

A podcast may be the best plot device to come out of Ghosts yet.

Seriously, a true-crime podcast is a perfect excuse for these ghosts to embrace Alberta’s murder from a pure entertainment standpoint. She has arguably one of the coolest deaths, so it’s fitting her story would live on in an equally cool way.

And finding an opportunity to bring creepy Todd back into the mix sweetens the pot.

Whether it’s something as simple as Alberta’s “No pod, no Todd” decree or the ghosts become entirely unhinged by Todd’s slow reading as they try to snoop, the presence of a familiar outsider keeps this show on its toes comedically.

The idea that Alberta’s murder mystery could continue as a condensed saga is intriguing. Like the longest game of Clue, the show can continuously revisit the topic and unearth new morsels of evidence with increasingly juicer flashbacks.

It is once again a delight to see Danielle Pinnock take center stage.

Alberta isn’t always the loudest ghost in the room, so having her backstory and plot twist center around the mentality that she has to be her own loudest fan is an excellent reveal for the character.

Her comedy and talent can easily get lost in the shuffle; it’s important to see her speak her truth no matter how difficult. It truly does make her more relatable to those that may have overlooked the singer at first.

However, there’s no overlooking this star when Ghosts gives her the grand set-pieces and sweeping storytelling she deserves. And hearing about her dad’s bootlegging and the more discreet mob dealings is almost as valuable as seeing Alberta own the stage with a stunning serenade.

From a catalog of catchy tunes to diabolical past lives, so much of Alberta is yet to be explored.

And what’s not to love about Hetty and Flower’s encounter with the washing machine?

These self-contained, Sam-less explorations are so valuable to the framework of this show. They open the door to an entire wheelhouse of jokes while still staying in touch with the concept of learning to live in death.

Ghosts‘ choice to incorporate honest female issues into the first season was a surprising generosity from its male showrunners but clearly not a fluke.

Hetty’s late-stage sexual awakening and the shame she feels for exploring her body isn’t as outdated a notion as we think. Many women can relate to that debilitating shame. So to have Flower be that voice of encouragement and reason for Hetty has enormous ramifications for the reckoning feminist.

Ghosts is changing how network television tackles challenging issues, one broken washing machine at a time.

As far as sequels go, “Alberta’s Podcast” proves the sitcom’s confined bouts of storytelling are paying off.

These tiniest morsels of character backstory offer this spirited sitcom plenty of ghost stories and skeletons in the closet to play with.

Now that Alberta’s murder mystery is turning into a full-blown franchise of episodes, we can look forward to encore stories for the singer, who has more than earned her time in the spotlight.

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Ghosts airs Thursdays at 8:30/7:30c on CBS.

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