Series / Ghostwriter (2019)

A reboot of the quirky kids mystery series that ran on PBS from 1992 to 1995, the 2019 series is set in the present with a new set of characters.

Ruben and his mom, Amy, have moved to a new city to help his grandfather Ernesto run the family bookstore after the death of his grandmother. Neighbor and middle school classmate Chevon is a frequent visitor to the bookstore and, to Ruben’s initial annoyance, was closer to Ernesto and his wife than they were to Ruben.

Ruben struggles with adjusting to his new school and eats alone in the hallway, much to the chagrin of Principal Fong. He unintentionally meets Curtis, a popular athlete, when he injures him with soup he spilled while eating lunch in the hallway. Curtis and his sister, Donna, visited the bookstore together when they were younger, but their visits stopped as they grew older and their interests diverged.

The unlikely team is brought together when a mysterious ghost, whom they dub "Ghostwriter", begins leaving cryptic messages and summoning characters from books into the real world.

After the four kids solve the initial mystery at the end of season 2, season 3 debuted a new group of kids: Nia, the daughter of the president of the local university; Charli, an aspiring magician; and Samir, a Syrian refugee who lives above the bookstore. They are guided by a new ghost, using similar methods as the first, as they solve a new mystery centered around the university.

The series premiered on Apple TV+ on November 1, 2019. A second season made its debut on October 9, 2020.

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This show provides examples of:

• Adaptational Superpower Change: The original Ghostwriter was restricted to manipulating the letters he could already access, be it from books, signs or even fridge magnets. He only had full access on computer screens. The new Ghostwriters can create any letters they want, so long as there is a writing surface available. The new Ghostwriters can also manipulate objects in order to get the group to do certain things, while the old Ghostwriter was powerless outside of the ability to write.
• Adaptational Sympathy: The Wicked Witch of the West is given this treatment in a modern update of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Tin Girl was her best friend, but didn't invite her to a party, leading to a falling out between them and causing the witch to make a Face–Heel Turn. They reconcile at the end of "Ghost of Oz."
• The B Grade: One of Chevon's classmates says that partnering with her was like a guaranteed B. Chevon retorts that she doesn't get Bs. She is horrified when she gets a D- in the bad future in "Ghost Castaways".
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In "The Ghostly Paintbrush", Ruben's paintings start being brought to life, which he exploits to grant the wishes of his friends and family (albeit unintentionally in the case of Chevon). All the "wishes" end up backfiring in some way.
• Black and Nerdy: Chevon read psychology books and would do geometry proofs at lunch, even before Ghostwriter appeared.
• Blank Book: Books whose characters have been released into the real world appear blank, and the characters disappear from the cover.
• Cool Old Guy: Ernesto, Ruben's grandfather.
• Creator Cameo: During "Ghost Cab", Kwame Alexander (the author of the poem "Ode to a Taxi Driver") appears As Himself.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • Bagheera is one of Mowgli's strongest allies, although a black panther.
  • Although Hitch dresses all in black, he is the hero of his story.
• Everytown, America: The kids seem to avoid naming the city they're actually in, despite it having strong New York City vibes (contrast this to the original series, which was set specifically in Brooklyn). We do know it's a city big enough for a subway system, however. Season 3 has the Metro City News, which hints at a possible name of the city.
• Framing the Guilty Party: This is how the kids manage to take down the mastermind at the end of season 3; since he'd previously had the real Eloquent Peasant planted at Nia's house to frame her mom, they have to sneak it onto his boat and plant it in his office in order to prove his guilt.
• Friendless Background: Although Chevon offered a seat with her friends in the cafeteria, Ruben chooses to eat his lunch alone in the hallway of his new school.
• Gender Flip:
  • invoked Possibly with Ghostwriter. While the original was assumed by the kids and confirmed by Word of God to be male, this one is speculated to be Ruben's grandmother. The end of "Franken-Ghost" subverts this, as they later believe Ghostwriter to be Mason Briggs, the pen name of an old mystery writer. Then Double Subverted by the end of part two of Ghost Castaways, where it's revealed that Mason Briggs is the pen-name of Sarah Weaver, and she confirms that she's Ghostwriter with signed books at the end of the second season.
  • Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are from a gender-flipped version written in-universe.
  • The greedy emperor from the Chinese folktale "Mali and the Magic Paintbrush" is reimagined as a materialistic teenage girl in the Setting Update. Though she doesn't appear, the main character, Malia, is also a gender-flipped version of her folktale counterpart.
  • The Tin Man is reimagined as The Tin Girl in a modern update of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• Ghostwriter: The usual literary definition of the term is explained by Captain Vincent. At the end of season 2, the kids end up becoming ghostwriters for Ghostwriter, completing her unfinished book under her (real) name.
• Humanshifting: Rainbow, the subject of "She's a Rainbow" by the Rolling Stones, has the ability to shapeshift into other people. Her being able to do this doesn't help much because she is still Invisible to Normals, but by wearing her bracelets the kids gain the ability too. However, the transformations are liable to fail if Rainbow ever feels sad or angry.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each storyline has the word "Ghost" in a title that otherwise describes the story they come from.
• Invisible to Normals: The chosen child protagonists are the only ones who can see and hear the literary characters. Later, some things related to Ghostwriter's hauntings can be seen, but usually when they were created in the real world instead of a book's world. Also, while the book characters themselves cannot be seen, if they interact with the environment, their movement can be observed.
• Lighter and Softer: The original series was about solving mysteries and could get pretty intense despite the network censorship it was under, while this one is mostly an encouragement for kids to read, as literary characters escape into the real world and the gang have to learn about their stories to get them back. There is an overall mystery, but only something linked back to something unfinished in the ghost's life.
• Light Is Not Good: Although he dresses in light colours, the Camarillo Kid is a thief and actively tries to get Curtis in trouble.
• Lost in Transmission: Occurs at the end of "The Jungle Ghost" story. While Mowgli and the other characters from The Jungle Book are returning to the book, the kids have one last chance to hear from Spinoza the cat about Ruben's grandmother's secret. The cat gets as far as telling them that she had a hidden letter, but the Speaks Fluent Animal effect wears off before they can find out what the letter said.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Despite what the cast assumes in "The Ghostly Paintbrush", Ghostwriter's power doesn't work on paintings. What she actually did was summon a magical paintbrush from a Setting Update of a Chinese folktale.
• Me's a Crowd: During "The Ghostly Paintbrush", Ruben inadvertently creates a copy of Chevon. Chevon decides to take advantage of this by splitting her many extracurricular activities with the copy.
• Mistaken for Thief: While Nia is helping Charli's father unload a truck, a passing stranger assumes she's stealing and calls the police, until Charli and her father return to set her straight. The incident leaves Nia rattled for the rest of the season.
• Moustache de Plume: Mason Briggs was actually the pen name of Sarah Weaver, who wrote detective stories in the 1950s, but could not get them published under her real name. The man in the book jacket photos was her lawyer, who acted as the face of Mason Briggs in order to protect her identity.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Donna wears a pen on a string around her neck during the "Franken-Ghost" arc, so she can keep notes in her notebook. The kids in the original show also carried around pens like that so they could talk to Ghostwriter anywhere.
  • The final arc of season 2 has the team solving a traditional case like the original show did, and it has a sequence where they identify all the suspects and their motives then follow up on them.
  • "The Ghost Castaways" has the team trying to save their founding member from being Ret-Gone due to a change in history, just as in the original series' "Just In Time" arc.
  • In the tie-in book Trinity, the epilogue reveals that the events of the story were a video game being played by Jamal and Gaby from the original series.
• New Transfer Student: Ruben is attending a new school, having recently moved to The City after his grandmother passed away.
• Original Generation: While most of the book characters are from either real-life books or adaptations of them, there are a few original stories, such as Trinity, created specifically for the series.
• Perspective Flip: The opening of "A Sparkly Ghost" shows what being pulled out of a book by Ghostwriter looks like from the point of view of a character in the book.
• Politically Correct History: Played with. During the storylines in which the kids are in the past, Chevon isn't treated unfairly due to being black; however, the previous owner of the bookstore was sexist, and sexism forced Sarah Weaver to write under a male pseudonym. This also influenced the character of Frank in Weaver's unfinished final book, who was the real detective solving all of Owen Quinn's cases but couldn't take the credit due to his race.
• Public Domain Character: Season 1 features characters from Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book,, and Frankenstein. In season 2, Genderflipped versions of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson appear. Season 3 naturally starts with The Wizard of Oz characters, although slightly modified.
• Put on a Bus: Ruben's mother Amy is the only major character to return for season 3; she states that Ruben is now in high school, which is implicitly also the case for Curtis and Chevon at least. She and Ruben have also moved out of their old home above the bookstore (which is now Samir's home).
• "Reading Is Cool" Aesop: The general message of the series, as each episode arc features literary characters who have escaped into the real world but are only visible to the foursome. In the end, though, while the team does gain a greater appreciation for literature, the true lesson they learn turns out to be a Writing Is Cool Aesop, when they have to draw on aspects of all the stories they've encountered in order to finish Sarah Weaver's last book.
• Red Herring: In Season 3, the kids initially suspect Professor Todd McCormick of being behind the Eloquent Peasant theft, because he'd been vocally opposed to Nia's mother being named University president, having wanted the job for himself. This gives him a motive to create a scandal around her, but it turns out that he had nothing to do with it.
• Refugee from TV Land: The Ghostwriters are capable of releasing the characters from books, rendering the pages blank. Once the protagonists have solved the characters' problems, they return to the book. Later on, this ability is also shown to extend to other forms of media, including poems and even songs (which result in the vocals disappearing from the song). Inverted in "The Ghost Writer", where the protagonists have to enter the unfinished book in order to learn the plot and write down what happens. In season 3, also inverted by "The Ghost's Web", in which Nia alone is brought into Charlotte's Web.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In-Universe. The plot of the final Owen Quinn novel, "The Cobalt Mask", drew heavily from current events in Sarah Weaver's life, including an implied conflict about whether she would reveal herself as Mason Briggs.
• Ret-Gone: The time travel arc "Ghost Castaways" has Ruben disappear when the team accidentally prevents his grandparents from becoming friends.
• Saving the Orphanage: Or bookstore, in this case. Ruben's grandfather's bookstore is in financial trouble and a running plot in the second season is the adults trying to find a way to make it profitable so they won't have to sell it and see it shut down.
• School Club Front: In season 3, the explanation the kids give for their interest in the mystery is that they are in a "Young Archaeologist's Club" at school.
• Shout-Out: Naturally, all the works of fiction featured in each storyline are their own shout outs (aside from the ones invented for the show), but Ruben is introduced by reading Naruto.
  • The school play is of The Tempest.
  • One school assignment had Curtis and Chevon reading Treasure Island.
• Soft Reboot: Season 3 gets rid of the original 4 and brings in three new children and a new Ghostwriter. Otherwise, the same setting is used, with the new Ghostwriter having similar powers to the one from the first two seasons. Character-wise, only Ruben's mother has carried over to season 3.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Whenever Mowgli is around, the kids are able to understand and speak with animals.
• Stage Magician: Charli is an amateur magician. She gets training to improve her magic act from Leo, a book character who is also a magician. Later, Charli is invited to a club where magicians perform for the guests.
• Student Council President: A subplot in season 2 is Chevon's campaign to be student council president (which she is forced into by a magically-created copy of herself, but she proceeds to stick with). She starts off as a serious underdog, because her primary issue is that the sports teams get too much attention and funding compared to the rest of the school. To fix this issue, she recruits Curtis to run for vice president. They lose the election, but decide to lobby the winners to work on their priorities anyway.
• Temporal Sickness: Ruben and Curtis both get nauseous on different occasions while they are time traveling. The sickness is cured by eating food originating from their present day.
• Tie-In Novel: The show has a line of books that includes the classic Public Domain literature featured and the original books made up for the series.
• Time Machine: In season 2, the protagonists travel through time on the Vermillion from the Time Castaways series.
• Truer to the Text: Much like many modern versions of the character, Frankenstein's Monster is quite articulate, with only informed hideousness. Also, despite being initially persuaded to create a second monster to befriend the first, Dr. Frankenstein loses his nerve at the last second and refuses to follow through. The kids end up finishing the job.
• Unfinished Business: The team suspects that this is GW's reason for staying around and bringing characters out of books. They're right; Ghostwriter wants them to find her final manuscript and to use what they learned about writing stories to finish it.
• Unfolding Plan Montage:
  • During "The Magic Ghost", as Leo explains how someone could have replaced the Eloquent Peasant with a forgery, there's a montage cutting between an imaginary scene of Nia as the criminal enacting the plan, and the real Nia testing out the plan in reality.
  • At the end of "The Eloquent Ghost of the Bayou", the children similarly describe their reverse-heist plan to sneak the Eloquent Peasant onto the yacht Adrian. Naturally, as the plan is seen, things don't go exactly as planned.
• Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World: Having invisible book characters running around results in a lot of issues for the kids' school lives. Downplayed in season 3, where the focus is taken off of school and instead given to other aspects of the kids' personal lives when they aren't working on mysteries.
• Write Who You Know: In-Universe, four characters in The Cobalt Mask perfectly line up with the main characters. They believe it was done intentionally based off them meeting Sarah Weaver back in the 1950s.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: In season 3, the team thinks they've solved the mystery by working out that Amber, Liam, and Griffin were behind the crime. At Oliver Ramos' memorial service, however, they find evidence that the conspiracy went deeper than they thought.

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