Who you gonna call? Estate Busters?

This is a show, right from the off, that knows what it is. Do not adjust your sets, you didn’t switch to a channel showing The Exorcist by mistake.

The premise is simple: if your house is haunted, it’s going to be harder to sell (although I’d have thought there would be a few people who would be up for that sort of thing) so you need a specialist Real-estate agency (sur-real estate, geddit?) to help you shift it.

In the opening minutes, about half a dozen horror classics are invoked, in a cheeky ‘nod-to-camera’ way in that the images and references are so obvious that it manages to do something quite interesting. It skips over ‘cliché’ and feels just on the right side of ‘different’ to hook the audience. I’m on board if it has haunted houses and a few jump scares.

We have some usual tropes – the pretty fiancée with the douchebag partner, the gang of misfits, including a former priest, who make up the team of agents, and the ‘new girl’ who conveniently helps the script with some exposition. She’s feisty, I’m very much down with that, more please – but would you really break down on your first day and tell your new boss all about the affair with your old one that got you fired? That’s the only thing that feels a little clunky to me, a little unnatural, almost as if a part of the scenery at the back of the stage has come loose and you can see the workings behind it. But I’m prepared to overlook it – there’s some cool gadgetry on display and enough of a back story set up for our key runners and riders that will have me tuning in for more.

Verdict: A darkly humorous take on working with the supernatural. 7/10

Claire Smith