The Best TV Gems You Should Stream This Month
Here at Digg we try to keep you up-to-date with review roundups on the latest big-item TV premieres. Of course, not every show gets the pre-launch buzz it deserves. In the age of streaming services there's more good stuff than ever, but some of it takes a little time to find an audience and champions amongst critics. Here are some recent gems you might've missed and some good takes on them — if any of these shows catch your eye, they're just a click away.
'American Vandal' (Netflix, 8 episodes)
Netflix is having their "Making a Murder" cake and eating it too with "American Vandal," a "true crime" genre parody par-excellence from creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda. The crime in question? Big red penises spray painted on the cars of 27 faculty members at a small California high school. The accused? The school's self-professed king of pranks (who's swearing his innocence). The documentarian? An A.V. club geek who's perhaps too close to the case himself.
For all the juvenile humor and ribbing of "true crime" tropes, "American Vandal" actually cares about its characters. The case in question might be sophomoric, but the consequences for people's actions are pretty sobering and adult.
American Vandal knows exactly what it is doing. It's such a good true crime parody that it might even ruin the genre for you, but like, in a good way. What starts as a straightforward(-ish) investigation zooms off down path after path on the hunt for new theories. New suspects are looked at, inconsistencies are examined in painstaking detail, a huge conspiracy wall is constructed with pictures of people and strings of yarn connecting them to index cards with questions marks. A big break in the case stems from the way the penises are drawn. The show spends a lot of time on it. It's really just delightful.
[UPROXX]
In the show, Snapchat videos and Instagram Boomerangs are used as alibis, evidence, or a way for junior documentarians to create timelines and track conversations. The team's hard-and-fast rule was that all these videos needed to be "as authentic as possible," Yacenda says. "We always wanted to have logic of why a high-school kid would be shooting a video in the first place. Maybe it's somebody taking a selfie in the foreground, and something's happening in the background."
The show's genius lies in that narration, a conscious imitation of the now-inescapable Ira Glass style — casual commentary that almost sounds improvised, and that indicates not an omniscient, authoritative voice but a more of-the-moment version: a conflicted and inexorably biased narrator who can't help but involve himself in the story. Like other recent reality-TV spoofs (Nathan for You, Review), American Vandal takes on the anxiety of impartiality — the inevitability that the storyteller will infect the story with his point of view.
Watch it if: you couldn't tear yourself away from "Serial"… or if you couldn't stand everyone telling you to listen to "Serial" and stuck with "Comedy Bang Bang" instead.
'The Tick' (Amazon Prime, 6 episodes)
This reimagining of "The Tick" for the "MCU" age is helmed by Ben Edlund, the guy who created the bumbling blue bug in the '80s. Compared the cartoon show and the early '00s live action version starring Patrick Warburton, this incarnation of "The Tick" puts its absurd heroes and villains in a world where the ordinary people are — for the most part — grounded.
When The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) meets his sidekick-to-be Arthur (Griffin Newman), he's not exactly greeted with open arms. Arthur struggles with paranoia and hallucinations: the only person he can trust less than The Tick might be himself. The show doesn't wallow in darkness or lean on Arthur's illness for inappropriate gags, nor does it waste your time: the first six episodes tell a nice little arc. Six more episodes are scheduled to premiere in January 2018.
This show knows exactly how many Marvel and DC movies we've seen over the past decade, and gleefully mocks itself for following some of the same beats as many of them. Luckily, this show is easily clever enough that you never really care that it occasionally dips into a cliche without subverting it.
Unbelievably forthright, wholesome, and durable, the Tick comes across as if he's meant to occupy a position of glory in that wondrous superhero history. But he's dumb as all get-out, blundering along without Arthur's brains. It's been a staple of Tick fictions that Arthur needs the Tick as a portal to the excitement of superhero life but, here, the Tick needs Arthur for direction. The Tick knows his purpose but isn't great at executing it in a world that isn't a cartoon. Arthur wants nothing to do with adventuring but he's naturally gifted with skills that can root out the big evil lurking in the shadows.
[io9]
Superhero fiction is more popular than it has ever been in its eight decades of existence, with acrobatic tales of derring-do clogging up multiplexes and streaming-video queues around the world. But there are precious few genuinely insightful satires of superhero-dom in the film and television market, forcing viewers to question the logic behind their own appetites for these sorts of chronicles. Any genre worth its salt needs entries that can entertain while also intelligently deconstructing, and The Tick is aiming to do just that.
[Vulture]
Watch it if: you really needed a shot in the arm to remind you why superheroes are fun after watching "Iron Fist."
'Neo Yokio' (Netflix, 6 episodes)
This animated series from the mind of Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig has a ridiculously good cast and a premise that will delight anybody who takes anime seriously but not too seriously (Koenig himself has some thoughts on whether you can call it an anime). Twitter "expanding brain" precursor Jaden Smith stars as Kaz Kaan, a bougie, depressed, young demon hunter living it up in partially underwater New York Ci–sorry, Neo Yokio.
You might have heard the show didn't get great reviews — it'd be juvenile to accuse unimpressed critics of "not getting it," but the show really is made for the tiny set of people who're familiar with "Ranma ½," know who Tavi Gevinson is and tune into Viceland's "Desus & Mero" every weeknight.
Neo Yokio treads a line between ironic detachment and honest social critique that makes it hard to interpret at times. If everything is ironic, does it reveal some kind of sincerity? Or does the underlying truth of ironic statements only make them more ironic? Is it a joke that an image-obsessed rich person would say that a diamond-encrusted skull is the greatest work of art of all time, or is it still kind of true despite that joke?
[Kotaku]
Kaz calls the neighborhood store clerk "store clerk," doesn't realize until episode four that his robot butler has a human pilot, and uses the slur "Hamptons hillbilly" to describe his cousin. The characters go to a club where the DJ "spins Gregorian house" and Kaz's friends are deeply involved in inventing a "Caprese martini." How could Neo Yokio be read as anything but pure, self-aware satire that is trying to drag everything about New York City elitism?
The jokes range from sight gags (Kaz's go-to diplomatic move is to bring an oversize bar of Toblerone to whoever he's trying to cheer up or apologize to) to absurdism (Kaz's friends start a drink/bar/lifestyle brand around a cocktail called the Caprese) to cerebral (Kaz's mecha-butler, who he and the viewer assume is just a robot, turns out to be piloted by a mechanical turk).
Watch it if: you can see yourself visiting the Whitney, taking pics in a Puri booth and buying a loosie from a bodega in the same afternoon.
'The Good Place' (NBC, 13 episodes — Season 1 on Netflix)
This show from creator Michael Schur ("Parks and Recreation," "Brooklyn Nine-Nine") premiered on NBC late last year and received some tentative praise at first. The concept: selfish jerk Eleanor (Kristen Bell) has died and been mistakenly sorted into an afterlife neighborhood for good people, overseen by its benevolent architect Michael (Ted Danson).
The first season picked up steam and steadily attracted fans before taking a brief hiatus at election time — when the finale aired in January, the praise was effusive. Bell, Danson and the rest of the cast all give great performances (especially William Jackson Harper as the perpetually pent-up Chidi), but "The Good Place" is a can't miss because the afterlife it builds is full of mystery and raw comic potential. The second season just started on NBC, so you can easily catch up in a single weekend.
There are plenty of other current shows blurring the line between comedy and drama. But unlike those hybrids (BoJack Horseman, Atlanta, Insecure, You're the Worst), The Good Place is, tonally, 100 percent sitcom. It has, however, the spine of a twist-y, reality-questioning show like Lost or Westworld[…]
Bell is the perfect choice for Eleanor, as her innate brightness keeps us rooting for Eleanor to brazen her way through her mistaken admittance to paradise, even as she throws herself into her character's consistently reprehensible self-centeredness. Sure, she doesn't deserve to be in the good place, but since they did give her a glimpse of her heart's desire, her beady-eyed greed to hang on to it has, in Bell's performance, a certain, grimy admirability to it, and she seeds Eleanor's actions with just the merest hint of inner pain.
It's Kimmy Schmidt-like in tone, cartoonish and brisk and packed with expensive CGI to flesh out the fantasy setting. Schur's skill is in coming up with an idea, however knotty and in need of explanation, which allows for a kind of narrative-reset button to depress every time you think you're getting the hang of things. Audience persistence is paid off in spades, so stick with it for the whole first series.
Watch it if: you love a good sitcom and REALLY love to read and post theories about shows in the comment sections of blogs.
