• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 18, 2023

A team of five gay ghost-hunters will turn their queer eyes on the spirit world just in time for Halloween.

The fab five are the stars of “Living For The Dead,” the latest entry in TV’s never-ending fascination with haunted houses and the temperamental spirits that reside there.

The show comes from the co-creators of “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” -- David Collins and Michael Williams.

How time flies! Incredibly, it’s been 20 years since that show burst onto TV in July 2003. 

Airing on Bravo, the show had five gay men -- known as the Fab Five -- counseling and making over disheveled straight men who were struggling with grooming and slovenly lifestyles.

The Fab Five each had a specialty relevant to the task at hand -- food and drink, hair and personal grooming, interior design, fashion and culture. 

On “Queer Eye,” these areas of expertise were positioned on the show as gay-oriented -- implying that these gay men, or gay men in general, were better suited for dispensing grooming, dining and fashion advice than other groups.

This is where “Queer Eye” diverges from “Living For the Dead.” The five participants in this gay ghost-hunting show include a psychic, another psychic who also reads tarot cards, a tech maven, a practitioner of West African Juju, and a drag queen.

Their skills seem relevant to ghost-hunting, but as far as I can tell, their talents are not exclusive to the gay community.

But in keeping with the old “Queer Eye” formula, the Fab Give ghostbusters bring what some regard as a gay point of view to their work.

Most often, this is expressed in offhand remarks and gestures about their surroundings, themselves and each other.

Episode One has the “Ghost Hunties,” as they call themselves, traveling down a dusty desert highway to the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada (pictured above).

The motel is owned by two immigrants from India, one of whom is a lifelong clown enthusiast. 

But he reports that some of his guests have been suddenly departing in the middle of the night, claiming to be fleeing from spectral clowns.

And so, the five Ghost Hunties check into their own rooms in the hopes of encountering the restless spirits of dead clowns.

But before that, a comment about the décor. “Honestly?” asks Logan, one of the show’s two psychics, as he looks around his room. “The clowns aren’t really bothering me. It’s the bedspread that I find horrific!”

TV is awash in ghost-hunting shows in which gung-ho and well-equipped ghost hunters set up shop in houses, castles and abandoned hospitals to find and film the ghosts who supposedly haunt these places.

These shows are rarely satisfying for one big reason: Few, if any, ghosts are ever sighted. And when the ghost hunters declare the presence of a ghost, they are not convincing to the rest of us.

In the absence of real ghost sightings, the other shows are uniformly dreary. But with this group of five gay ghost hunters, “Living For The Dead” is anything but that.

“Living For The Dead” starts streaming on October 18 (Wednesday) on Hulu.