Rose McIver is speaking to me over Zoom from her bedroom. Like Sam, the character she plays in CBS’s Ghosts, she is completely and utterly charming. But she’s also multi-tasking—her eyes keep darting down to the baby monitor sitting next to her.
McIver is no stranger to carrying on a conversation while she’s, shall we say, distracted by an invisible presence. As Sam, she does it constantly—not with the ever-present pressures of a newborn, but rather, with a motley crew of ghosts that only she can see. “It’s obviously very different in many ways, but Sam doesn’t get to switch off, and as a new mum, I don’t either,” she says. “That’s been an interesting little parallel to draw this year.”
Inspired by the British series of the same name, Ghosts follows Sam and her husband Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) after they inherit a crumbling old estate, Woodstone Mansion. When Sam takes a near-fatal tumble down the stairs, she discovers that she can see and communicate with the group of ghosts who also live in the old house. Sam becomes the ghosts' link to the world of the living: She helps them with their internal dramas, negotiates with them about the future of the house, and even assists them as they try to resolve the unresolved issues from their lives so that they can leave their ghostly purgatory and get “sucked off” (yes, that is the official terminology) to finally rest in peace.
Now in its fourth season, the show has more than found its stride—Sam, Jay, and the core group of ghosts have their endlessly colorful dynamics down to an art and the show has settled into the kind of cozy rhythm we all crave from a long-running sit-com.
McIver compares returning for a fourth season to coming back to college after the summer break. “It’s like you’ve spent summer away and then you’ve come back and everybody’s missed each other. You get to reconnect,” she says. “And there’s a certain creative shorthand already there that just makes the workflow so much easier on set.”
Four seasons in, the writers have hit their stride with the cast, too. “It feels like the writers know exactly how to write for you. It starts to be art imitating life and life imitating art a little bit with some of the pairings and the sense of humor that you might have with a specific person,” she says.
This season, Sam finds herself having to confront her own inner struggle between wanting to please a very demanding horde of eccentric ghosts, while also balancing her own needs and wants as a living person. “Sam very much wants to be liked—she just wants to be included and she doesn’t want to offend anybody. But you can’t accommodate everybody,” McIver says. As a new mother, McIver can relate. “In my own life, I don’t have the capacity to care quite as much about what other people think,” she says. “So it’s been interesting.”
McIver announced her first pregnancy in January year when she was deep into filming the third season of the show. The writers decided against writing her pregnancy into Sam’s storyline, so, in Season 3, McIver found herself spending a whole lot of time standing behind strategically placed desks and buried under bulky coats to conceal her growing bump.
McIver gave birth to her first child in the summer and, just 11 weeks later, she was back on set for Season 4. “It was early. It’s my first child, so I’m learning a lot,” she admits. “But everybody’s been great and incredibly supportive and wonderful.”
Sam, now freed from those bump-concealing desks and coats, seems to be busier than ever. For one thing, a new ghost has joined the crew and Sam is, as Jay puts it, undertaking a “ghost reclamation project.” The puritanical Patience (Mary Holland), we learn, died in the 1600s and lived with the three eldest ghosts, Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones), Sasappis (Román Zaragoza), and Thorfinn (Devan Chandler Long), before getting lost in the dirt below the house where she roamed around aimlessly for several centuries slowly losing her mind. She is, as Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) says, “a lot” or as Sasappis says, “exhausting.”
“We are so lucky to have Mary Holland playing Patience,” McIver says of the newest ghost. “It’s a role that in its very nature is so dour and could fall a little flat and become energy sucking with the wrong actor. But with Mary playing Patience, she’s such an energized, driven, motivated character. She’s very active.” In other words, Patience is totally wacky and she’s already wreaking utter havoc on the house.
One of her first big moves comes with the arrival of Frank (Dean Norris), Sam’s father, and his new girlfriend, Diane (Melinda McGraw).
“We waited a good couple of years before meeting him,” says McIver of Frank’s first appearance in the series. “I think that anticipation helped define her character a lot. There was this presence that was never spoken about and something that she longed for. And I think in his absence, we got a very strong sense of what she might need from him and of where some of those gaps in her ability to set boundaries come from.”
We learn that Frank was largely absent from Sam’s life when she was young and that Sam, in turn, has a checkered history with his new romantic partners. Once, she cut one of his girlfriend’s hair while she slept and claimed it had been a ghost.
Although Sam wants to have a fresh start with her father, things quickly go awry when a horrified Patience learns that he and his girlfriend will be sharing a bedroom out of wedlock. She whips out her ghost power, which, it turns out, is the ability to make blood pour down the walls. On this occasion, she writes “sin” on their bedroom wall. Frank can only assume this is another of Sam’s elaborate pranks designed to push away another one of his girlfriends.
Sam lies and takes the blame. Now, as Ghosts fans know, Sam is something of a habitual liar. But in this case, she is forced to tell a lie that actually reveals a deeper truth, too.
“She lies to try to protect relationships and she does that in this case,” says McIver, explaining why Sam takes the blame for Patience’s bloody party trick. “But here, the lie is a stepping stone to get to the truth—she is backed into a corner where the truth has to come out. And that’s what she’s been longing for with her dad the whole time is some genuine thread of communication.”
Of course, this is Ghosts and the poignant moment of connection is undercut by a truly absurd, decades-late recorder recital from Sam.
As Season 4 continues, McIver says, Sam will continue to learn and grow—and perhaps, she’ll even begin to prioritize her needs first.
“She is so aware of everybody else’s needs all the time, but I think the more she can vocalize and recognize in herself where some of this comes from, where this desire to belong comes from, I think it unlocks her ability to build healthier relationships going forward,” McIver says. “Because as much as she loves the ghosts, my goodness, it’s a codependent bunch—a group therapist would have a field day in there.”
Some of Sam’s growth comes from meeting some new living characters from Jay’s family. “I’m really excited for audiences to see Sam connect with some of his family,” she says. “That’s the great thing about being on a show that goes as long as we’re getting to go—you really do start to get underneath where these people come from and what makes them tick.”
And, of course, in addition to all of this character growth, the season has plenty of hilarity in store, too. McIver is especially excited for fans to see the Christmas two-parter episode and the Halloween episode. “I love it when we lean into the events on this show, because every character has a strong sort of stance on holidays. I think people will have a really good time watching!”
And what is McIver taking away from it all? Well, completing a fourth season of Ghosts as a new mother has left her feeling a little reflective. “I’m much more moment-to-moment than I’ve ever been,” she says. “Things feel much more indefinable and temporary from one week to another. I guess I have begun to relinquish a need to define things and a need to find the answers and to solve everything.”
After all, as funny and snappy as the show may be, it is, at its core, dealing with some hefty existential questions about the brevity of life and about what comes next. “On a show that is looking at morbidity and at how temporary our existence is here—it’s kind of just been a nice reminder to find the joy and find the humor,” she says thoughtfully. “It’s not like there’s some destination you’re going to reach where it all suddenly makes sense. These characters are people who are still discovering new things every day and learning from each other after centuries.”
