Netflix released Julie and the Phantoms on September 10, 2020, and then, in December 2021, cancelled it. One season. Nine episodes. That is the whole of it — a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an ending that arrived before most viewers had finished telling their friends to watch. Dan Cross and David Hoge created the show, based on the Brazilian series Julie e os Fantasmas, and what they built in those nine episodes is better than the treatment it got.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Julie Molina and the Band That Died in 1995
Madison Reyes plays Julie Molina, a teenager who has lost her passion for music and life. The show does not rush her back to it. She grieves, she stalls, she sits at a piano she cannot bring herself to play. Then three ghostly guys show up — Luke Patterson, Alex Mercer and Reggie Peters, played by Charlie Gillespie, Owen Patrick Joyner and Jeremy Shada — a trio who died before they got to be the band they wanted to be.
The mechanic is simple and it works. Julie can see them. Nobody else can. She helps them finish what they started; they help her find her way back to music. That is the engine of the show, and it runs clean for nine episodes without stalling.
Madison Reyes Carries the Quiet Scenes
Reyes is the reason this works. The show asks her to play grief, embarrassment, joy and stage fright, sometimes in the same scene, and she does it without reaching. When Julie finally sings again, the payoff lands because Reyes spent the earlier episodes earning it rather than announcing it.
Gillespie, Joyner and Shada have the harder job. They are ghosts, which means they are also comic relief, and the show leans on them for lightness whenever Julie’s story gets heavy. Luke is the driven one. Alex is the anxious one. Reggie is the one who says the strange thing. It is a familiar split, but the three of them sell it.
Flynn, Nick and the World Around Julie
Jadah Marie plays Flynn, Julie’s friend, and Sacha Carlson plays Nick. Both are given enough to do that the show never feels like it takes place in an empty room. Savannah May, Booboo Stewart, Cheyenne Jackson, Carlos Ponce and Sonny Bustamante round out the cast in recurring roles.
The show is billed as family, comedy and sci-fi and fantasy, and it earns all three labels. The fantasy is the ghost premise, handled with a light touch. The comedy is mostly the Phantoms adjusting to a world that moved on without them. The family part is Julie and her father, and it is played straight rather than sweet.
It is based on the Brazilian television series Julie e os Fantasmas.
That lineage matters. Cross and Hoge adapted rather than invented, and the show carries the shape of something that already worked elsewhere. The result is a series that knows what it is doing from the first episode — no flailing, no wasted setup.
Nine Episodes, No Wasted Time
Nine episodes is a short season, and Julie and the Phantoms uses every one of them. There is no filler arc, no episode that exists to pad a order. The show moves.
That economy cuts both ways. Characters like Nick and Flynn get less room than they deserve. The ghost mythology raises questions the season never answers. And the finale sets up a second season that, as of December 2021, will not come. Netflix cancelled the show after one season, which means the story ends on a promise the platform declined to keep.
That is not a flaw in the nine episodes. It is a flaw in how they were released and then abandoned. A show that ends mid-stride is still a show that ended mid-stride, and viewers who start it now should know that going in.
What the Show Gets Right
The music is the spine. Julie finds her voice through the Phantoms, and the Phantoms find their audience through Julie. Neither half works alone, and the show understands that. The best scenes are the ones where the two stories touch — a girl at a piano, three ghosts behind her, all of them getting something they had written off.
The tone stays consistent. It is warm without being saccharine, sad without being heavy, funny without undercutting the stakes. That balance is harder than it looks, and the show holds it across nine episodes.
The performances are the other anchor. Reyes is the discovery here, and the show is built to her strengths. The three Phantoms are a unit, and they play like one. Jadah Marie gives Flynn a spine. Nobody in the cast is coasting.
The Verdict on Julie and the Phantoms
Julie and the Phantoms scores 7.7 out of 10. That is a fair number for a show that does almost everything right within a season that was too short and a run that was cut off too soon.
What holds it back from higher is not craft. It is scope. Nine episodes cannot carry the weight of a full ensemble, and the show leaves Flynn, Nick and the ghost mythology underdeveloped in ways a second season would have fixed. The cancellation turned a promising first chapter into a complete but truncated story.
What it gets right is the thing that matters most: it makes you care about Julie Molina and the three dead boys who needed her. That is not a small achievement. Plenty of shows with twice the episode count and three times the budget never manage it.
Watch it. Know that it ends. The nine episodes are worth the unfinished feeling they leave behind.
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