School Spirits - Season 1 May 2026

The show masterfully uses the "unreliable living." We see the living world through Maddie’s voyeuristic eyes as she watches her best friend (the neurotic, brilliant Simon) and her mother (a recovering alcoholic played with raw agony by Maria Dizzia) fall apart. Simon is the only living person who can see her, a twist that adds a brilliant layer of tension. Their conversations happen in crowded hallways where no one else can hear them, creating a sense of claustrophobic intimacy.

If you love shows that use genre tropes to talk about grief, trauma, and the fear of being forgotten, this is for you. School Spirits - Season 1

For six episodes, we are led down a path of red herrings. We suspect the janitor. We suspect the boyfriend. We even suspect Simon at one point. But the finale pulls the rug out so violently that you’ll have to rewatch the entire season immediately. The show masterfully uses the "unreliable living

Maddie isn't dead. Her body is a stolen vehicle. This reframes the entire season. The "murder" we were investigating was actually a spiritual carjacking. If you love shows that use genre tropes

Well, not in the way we thought.

The world-building here is tight. Split River High isn't just a school; it’s a holding cell for a dozen or so ghosts, each representing a different era of trauma. You’ve got the 1970s burnout, the 90s goth kid, the theatre kid who died during a musical, and the jock who keeps trying to throw a football that passes through his hands every time. They have their own society, their own grief groups, and their own grudges. It’s like The Breakfast Club if the library was actually purgatory. Unlike traditional ghost stories where the protagonist wants to move on, Maddie wants to move back . She refuses to accept the "ghost rules" that the other spirits recite like scripture. The central hook of Season 1 is the mystery of where her body is.

We learn that Maddie wasn't murdered.