Sparkling cable dramas may dominate the conversation, but the expanding flexibility of the half-hour is among modern TV’s most exciting developments. Earlier this year, I wrote about the staggeringly unconventional animated series BoJack Horseman, which, despite its format, features more drama than comedy. Heading into the winter, two more prime examples – the morbidly absurd Getting On and the family tragicomedy Transparent – will debut their new seasons to outsized acclaim, relative to their viewership. These shows and others operate with exceptional creative freedom, products of a television age in which a small-scale critical darling can be infinitely valuable to premium content producers vying to stay relevant.
Comedy Central is one channel going down this road. Their scripted slate has, creatively, improved substantially – from Broad City to Inside Amy Schumer to Key & Peele – but has been unable generate big ratings. These series don’t function for that purpose. Rather, they’re examples of specific comedic voices being given the platform to make their art, generate passion and bring cultural cache to a network in serious need of it.
Andy Daly’s ruthless critical satire Review is the latest to join the network’s lineup. In its two years on-air, the series has delivered inconsequential ratings and an enthusiastic cult following, and might be less mainstream than anything we've seen from Comedy Central over the last decade. Its second season is uncompromising, bleak, strange and compulsively nasty – but also, at times, wildly funny. It’s an odd but fitting companion to Lifetime’s UnREAL, as Review situates challenging but fascinating moral dilemmas within an appropriately meta context: the production of television.
The opening credits find Forrest MacNeil (Daly) giddily introducing himself, explaining with pride that “rather than review food or books or movies,” he reviews “life itself.” He is, for all intents and purposes, a reviewer of life – a distinction he considers with curious importance, as if he’s solving societal issues of utmost complexity. For the fictional reality show Review, he evaluates various tasks on a five-star scale, and works within comically strict critical parameters. (Things get complicated when he’s asked to “review” a six-star review.) In reality, of course, Review doesn’t present anything resembling “authentic” to Forrest. Participants’ questions, asked via email, video and Twitter, reflect aspects of life far removed from such minutiae. Instead, they push Forrest further and further: “What’s it like to join a cult?” “What’s it like to get a divorce?” “What’s it liked to kill somebody?” Disturbingly, he follows through – every time.
It’s worth detailing the peculiar world of Review, because the series’ premise only begins to hint at its encompassing bizzaro-ness. Each episode begins in the Review studio, the space flashy but also overtly artificial, dominated by deep shades of blue. Forrest is always accompanied by cheery assistant A.J. Gibbs (Megan Stevenson), a woman who unobtrusively observes every terrible thing that happens to him with some combination of displaced eagerness and understandable concern. There’s also producer Grant (James Urbaniak), whose smarmy grin and sinister silence – especially when it comes down to whether Forrest will actually kill a person – invokes a startling degree of evil.
Once Forrest gets his assignment, he exits the studio with the determination to carry it out. As realized by principal director Jeffrey Blitz, the aesthetic of the series fundamentally shifts from poorly-produced game show to human-interest reality show; the artificiality of the production gives way to surprising realism. And that, in essence, is Review’s critical focus. There’s clearly very little value to the fictional Review – or at least, it’s antithetical to Forrest’s conception of it – but once its “host” goes out into the world with a mission to accomplish, the absurdity of the conceit works in tandem with its actual effect on Forrest. Through his unconscionable commitment to the show, he gets deeper in the process of destroying his life, one episode at a time.
Through this construct, Review touches on many themes. It subversively wrestles with TV as a commercial product, and criticism as valuable discourse – which, for this or any television critic, makes for an irresistible combination – while also digging into some timely social issues like “curing homosexuality.” (That one doesn't go too well.) The evolution from seasons 1 to 2 is also impressively organic. Daly, mad-minded comic that he may be, doesn’t take the short shrift in analyzing Review’s long-term impact on Forrest as a human being. The Review host resists the many life-altering aspects of the show in its first season; by the beginning of season 2, he’s wholly, and maniacally, embracing every bit of it.
Review elicits an unavoidable sense of complicity for the viewer to contend with. Despite its many specific merits, the series chiefly succeeds by sucking its audience deeper and deeper into its abyss of ratings-grabbing, life-destroying mania. There are very real emotional conflicts on-display – as in the collapse of Forrest’s marriage, unendingly worsened by his “occupational” commitments, or the many women Forrest begins to date, whose lives are utterly ravaged by what he is “tasked” to do to them – and to watch them play out so horrifically is engrossing in the best, worst kind of way. By the end of the second season, Forrest is reduced to a prison inmate with only an imaginary friend by his side. Said friend is “stabbed” by a group of convicts, and Forrest is brought to tears, crumpled on the floor – the moment would be flat-out depressing, were it not so uncomfortably, brilliantly funny.
In being so close to Forrest’s every action and gradual downfall, our relationship to Review is experiential. It's also enigmatic; we're so completely thrown in that it's impossible to watch the fictional Review from behind-the-scenes, or to understand it more objectively. The show edges closer to solving its mysteries in the second season finale, but only by having Forrest begin to question them himself (as in, going meta within meta). Tasked to evaluate “believing a conspiracy theory,” he asks legitimate and provocative questions that have long existed in the real Review audience’s mind: are Forrest’s tasks randomly decided, or does someone like Grant intentionally choose them? Why has Forrest nearly died 11 times? And what is Review, anyway? (He fails to suspect A.J.’s role in all this, which will forever be Review’s most magnificent, most maddening mystery.)
Forrest returns to his ex-wife, Suzanne (the great Jessica St. Clair) – whom he abruptly divorced after the show forced him to; whose father he accidentally killed during the show’s mandated trip to outer-space; and whom he set up with a philandering, egomaniacal baseball player in an attempt to explore “catfishing” as the show requested – to solve the dilemma. Equipped with a scruffy beard and crippling feelings of loneliness, he lays out his conspiracy theory. But Suzanne simply looks at him, tired, and explains that he’s to blame. Everything Forrest did he made the choice to do. And thus, his own decisions are why he’s left with nothing but a potential-12th near-death experience and a deceased imaginary friend.
That journey of self-desecration is what makes Review such great, visceral television. The process is laid out for Forrest’s audience, episode by episode – the very moral (and physical) deconstruction of a man. It’s an odd thing to so enjoyably check-in on weekly, but nothing about this show is sane. Quite the opposite, Review turns reality on its head – or, more specifically, it turns reality into television.
Grade: A