If you find a spacious New York apartment for $285 a month — even in 1987 — you aren’t getting a bargain. You’re probably getting a ticket to hell, baby.
Sandy Darhaus (Perry Lang) is a yuppie investment banker with the kind of high-strung, large-ham energy that makes you root for the ghosts from minute one. After years of crowded living conditions and awful roommates, Sandy thinks all his prayers are answered when he signs the lease on a massive pad. He even gets to show it off to his lovely fiancée, Laura (Nancy Travis).
There’s just one tiny catch: Ram (Harsh Nayyar), a cheerful, polite man from India who claims to be Sandy’s new roommate. The hitch? Ram only materializes when Sandy is completely alone, treats the toilet and running water like high-tech wizardry and brings along a whole family of phantom relatives.
Predictably, Sandy handles this cosmic intrusion with the grace of a sledgehammer. Instead of appreciating a guy who wants to help with chores and cook traditional meals, Sandy leans hard into being racist. Even when Laura dumps him because he’s losing his mind talking to an invisible squatter, Sandy responds by boarding Ram up in the bedroom with the spite of an exasperated landlord. When Sandy returns to find that a humiliated Ram has jumped to his death out the broken bedroom window, his relief is short-lived. Ram’s vengeful ghostly family swarms the apartment and unceremoniously hurls Sandy out that exact same window.
Director and writer Theodore Gershuny made another fine episode, even if I will be totally jealous of him forever, thanks to his marriage to Mary Woronov at one point.
