It hardly seems like an exaggeration to say that “Ghosts” — the hit CBS supernatural sitcom about a young couple who inherit a country house inhabited by many of the people who have died on the property over the centuries — lives and dies by the chemistry of its large ensemble. For the actors who play the eight main ghosts, the show’s success has given each of them a new lease on their careers. Take it from Sheila Carrasco, who plays ditzy hippie Flower: “I used to work four to five different part-time jobs at a time, so if I ever got fired from one of them for calling in sick to go to an audition, I would still make rent that month.
Now, I wake up and pinch myself almost every day ...
and I get weekends off!” The haughty, Irish-hating wife of a robber baron, Wisocky’s uptight, Gilded Age-era lady of the manor has — through her interactions with other ghosts, her distant descendant Sam (Rose McIver) and a faulty washing machine — opened herself up to the idea of pleasure and even the capacity for change. In the third season’s “Holes Are Bad” episode, Hetty reveals that, while facing criminal charges for her husband’s business practices and already feeling unhappy with the constraints of society, she died by suicide using a telephone cord — the same cord that she uses to save Flower from an abandoned well. “Articulating the perspective of a woman who has had 150 years of afterlife to reflect on that choice [to kill herself] and then revealing it.
