For the Glory of Abaddon

It’s the spooky season (well, okay, I’m writing this in November when people would generally consider the spooky season to have just ended, but we’ll let that slide) and it’s the right time to find a little something scary (or scary adjacent) to watch. Horror movies are great, and there’s the occasional horror series to get into, but sometimes you want something new and fresh to grab your attention. Or, at the very minimum, something new enough to you that you still feel like it counts.

Technically Haunted Hotel came out last year, with its first season debuting on NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). September 19, 2025, and I did actually try watching it back then. I got maybe four episodes into the season and said, “that’s amusing enough,” but didn’t really think long about it. I tend to grab Netflix for a month or two at a time, watch the few things on the network that still interest me (mostly just The Gentlemen at this point when a new season debuts) and then I cancel again once I’ve caught up. Netflix doesn’t have enough new stuff coming out regularly that I feel like watching where a regular subscription makes financial sense anymore. Haunted Hotel wasn’t good enough to keep me going at the time when my subscription ended.

However, with another couple of months of Netflix purchased recently, I saw that a second season of the show had debuted. I still hadn’t gotten through the first, but the show was just amusing enough that when I appeared in my queue again, I decided to give it another chance. And I felt justified in this, on both sides of the coin. Haunted Hotel is an amusing enough cartoon comedy that it’s worth watching if you don’t have anything else to grab your attention instead. But it’s also not good enough to make this the sole reason you’d want to go back to (or keep paying for) Netflix all on its own. It’s funny, but only moderately so, and its basic sitcom ideas don’t really feel all that fresh even when mashed against its haunted residence.

The first season focuses on the Freeling Family, with Katherine (Eliza Coupe) having inherited the hotel from her dead brother, Nathan (Will Forte). She moved in and took over the hotel, bringing along her two kids, Ben (Skyler Gisondo) and Esther (Natalie Palamides), so they could manage the failing hotel together. But there’s just one catch: Nathan is still around, a ghost within the hotel walls who is unable to escape. And he’s not the only one.

Through ten episodes (in this first season) the gang has to deal with all manner of ghostly occurrences, from hauntings in the hotel, to rooms trying to take people over, ghastly creatures out in the woods, and even a death cult wanting to destroy the world. That last bit is all because of the fifth regular resident of the hotel, Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson), a centuries old demon trapped in the body of a nine-year-old boy. Together they have to protect the hotel, and save the world, lest the hauntings in the hotel take over.

Functionally Haunted Hotel is a sitcom. You’ll get an A-plot, like Esther getting called into the principal’s office for a parent-teacher conference, with a haunted twist, which, in this case, is Esther raising a zombie to pretend to be her dad, all so she can avoid having to actually tell her mom what’s going on. Each episode will feature some kind of twist on a standard sitcom plot like this, with the show trying to mine humor from the fact that it’s doing wacky things in a haunted hotel while the main characters attempt to act like it’s perfectly normal.

I say “trying to mine humor” because, more often than not, it’s not really that funny. There are amusing moments, yes, but this show isn’t a laugh riot from beginning to end. Most of the sitcom-style plots are pretty old and hoary, and slapping them into a haunted locale doesn’t really change that. And that’s especially true when the characters (and actors) working the material aren’t really quippy or prone to big laughs. They’re standard characters going through standard lives, and if it weren’t for a few off-the-wall moments, each episode would be more dramatic than comedic, which is really strange for a show that is, at its core, supposed to be a sitcom animated show.

The best gags, honestly, come from Abaddon. Partly that because he’s the one truly out-there character – he’s adopted into the family because he has nowhere else to go, but he’s still a demon at heart – so the show can give him outlandish things to do and really pay off the concept of a haunted hotel. But the character also really works well because Jimmi Simpson is a hilarious actor. He can take the basic line readings for Abaddon and turn them into absolute gold, and it feels like the animators know this, so they give him more to do as the season goes on, all while playing to the character’s weird strengths.

Abaddon pays off the concept of the show the best because, at his core, he exists to do what the show intends to do: juxtapose normal people against an absurdist world. Abaddon is pure absurdity and the show plays it perfectly. And there are other characters like Stabby Paul and Candles, who are weird and provide some much needed levity the times they show up. But the show isn’t really able to get that perfect pitch in most episodes, so there are long places where the interesting characters don’t show up, where the fun situations barely exist, and we’re stuck watching a slide of life series about main characters that really just aren’t that interesting.

Most of the mains are stuck in place, unable to change or grow. Katerine is a single mother working in the hotel because she doesn’t have anything else to do, but we know so little of her life beforehand or afterwards that she could have come pre-installed in the hotel and we wouldn’t know any better. Her brother is quite literally installed in the hotel, and because he’s a ghost he isn’t actually allowed to change, and the show never really bothers to even try and make that happen. Ben and Esther are more absurd, in fairness, as Ben is a weird little erudite teen and Esther is an evil little magically-inclined troublemaker, but neither of them have plots that force them to grow or change. Everything happens on the margins while these characters are stuck in amber.

And this isn’t me trying to be cruel to the show. I watched through the whole first season, and I’m now slowly starting in on the second (before my Netflix membership ends later this month), and it’s a rare thing for me to get that deep into a Netflix show. Most of the time I watch a couple of episodes of a series, shrug, and move on, having forgotten them nearly as quickly as Netflix itself has. But Haunted Hotel was just good enough that I stuck with it, having a few really good pieces (like Abaddon) that made me want to see more. It’s not a perfect show, and I struggle to even call it that great, but in the sea of mediocre crap that exists on Netflix, this little sitcom is just good enough that I decided to keep watching. That’s not a rousing endorsement by any measure, but for a Netflix show, it’s like finding gold.