Director: Julio Torres
One missing earring becomes the thread that pulls together a whole city's worth of strange, tender, and very funny lives.
What is Fantasmas about?
The premise sounds small: Julio has lost a gold oyster earring and wants it back. But the search barely matters as a plot engine — it's the excuse for a series of stand-alone vignettes set in a version of New York that feels dreamed up rather than filmed. Each episode drifts into the orbit of a different oddball, from a Q&A show hosted from inside a washing machine to a company selling nostalgic memory experiences, and each one turns out to be quietly revealing something about identity, belonging, or the specific loneliness of being an artist who doesn't quite fit anywhere. The tone stays somewhere between deadpan sketch comedy and gentle melancholy, often within the same scene. It's less interested in tying its threads into a neat bow than in letting each detour breathe on its own terms before moving to the next.
Cast & crew
Julio Torres plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself, carrying the series with a performance that is equal parts wide-eyed and world-weary. Martine Gutierrez, Tómas Matos, and Joe Rumrill appear across the vignette structure, each shading a different corner of the show's oddball New York.
Context & significance
Written, directed, and starring Julio Torres, Fantasmas continues the surreal, sketch-adjacent sensibility he brought to his earlier comedy work, building an anthology-style comedy where the connective tissue is mood and voice rather than a conventional plot. The series leans on production design almost as heavily as dialogue, with handmade sets and puppet-like characters giving even its briefest detours a distinct visual identity that sets it apart from more conventional sketch formats.
Where & how to watch
Fantasmas can be watched on K-Time after a free account login, with a Farsi-language interface and Persian dubbing and subtitles available for viewers in the Iranian diaspora.