Then again, Los Espookys, which debuted last week and airs on HBO every Friday, is a show whose charms stem from its inexplicability. Blending magical realism with absurdist humor, the series tells a modest tale of four friends with a shared passion, but also comes across as an outlandish fever dream. Aside from a water demon, there’s also a cursed mirror and a seemingly possessed host of a news program devoted to sensational stories. “There were certain moments when we were writing where I truly felt, and I would tell Ana, ‘Okay, this is where HBO says, What the hell are you doing?’” Torres recalls. “That moment never came, to the point that I’m like, ‘Is it okay that no one stopped this? Like, have they seen it?’”

That high concept isn’t the only reason Los Espookys was a risky pitch. Most of the show’s characters speak Spanish, requiring English subtitles, and would be played by relative unknowns to an American audience. (Armisen plays a minor role.) In fact, Armisen had been hoping the series would land at HBO Latino when he met with the HBO programming chief Amy Gravitt, who oversees original comedies on the premium network. She didn’t see it that way, though. “The way I look at my slate, I like to balance out our larger, broader-appeal comedies with these specific comedic voices,” Gravitt told me. “When you go down the alternative path, you’re usually giving a voice to somebody who hasn’t had a shot before, so there’s something really exciting about that. You have a chance to experiment.” Los Espookys’ unconventionality, in other words, makes it worthwhile. And in its eccentric, concentrated package is a wealth of broader observations—on Latin American culture, on identity, on friendship.

Armisen built the skeleton of Los Espookys on his experiences in Mexico City. He based Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), the group’s leader, on a prosthetics artist he met during a research trip there. (“He had long hair,” Armisen remembers. “I wanted the main guy to be this guy, a guy who’s into horror and is also proudly Mexican.”) He came up with Andrés’s adoptive family’s business after thinking of the booming chocolate industry in his mother’s native Venezuela. And he imbued the show, shot in Chile, with positivity: In Latin America, he pointed out, people aren’t unnerved by horror; they rejoice in it.

“When I was a kid, I lived in Brazil, and I just remember in their soap operas how death was a really big scene,” Armisen told me, adding that he’d originally wanted to name the show Mexico City (Only Good Things Happen). “Horror, death, and the celebration of it really just coexists there.”

While Armisen crafted the story, Torres and Fabrega defined the show’s offbeat humor. The pair, rising comic stars who met years ago in the New York stand-up scene, share a whimsical comedic sensibility—both ace deadpan delivery while also incorporating a quirky stage presence and sharp observational humor. Fabrega’s early stand-up sometimes involved dressing up in a costume and delivering her jokes at a snail’s pace, and during her time as a writer on The Chris Gethard Show, she’d perform goofy bits with a straight face. Torres, now a writer on SNL, has created some of the late-night show’s most high-concept digital shorts, usually involving a single joke—an overdesigned sink, the typeface used for the film Avatar—transformed into a meditation on existence. “Our solo work is so different, but the middle of our Venn diagram is so big,” Fabrega observes.