BEST OF 2018 - AMERICAN VANDAL IS THE SH*T

9. AMERICAN VANDAL (NETFLIX)

The first season of American Vandal was the definitive parody of the True Crime genre to this point. And that was a genre that cried out for parody, both because of its requisite deadly-serious tone and because of just how suddenly it rose to rival the other pillars of the 20teens entertainment landscape, such as superhero movies, Tiffany Haddish, and watching racists play videogames you could just play yourself.

That first season succeeded at more than making murder-porn funny, which it did by shifting the backdrop from macabre to puerile. It also tapped into both eternal truths about high school and emerging truths about growing up on social media to craft a compelling, even tragic, mystery in its own right, and won a Peabody Award in the process. So the second season had a lot to live up it, before you even get to the immutable facts that comedy sequels are hard to pull off (just ask Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, Zoolander or Super Troopers), and parody sequels especially so (as any number of Scary Movies can attest). Plus, AV was tied so tightly to such a hyper-specific premise that reprising it would seem to require some sort of tortuous nonsense that would seem to be impossible to justify within the disarmingly realistic world it created.

But the AV team thread all these needles rather flawlessly. The second season premiere quickly establishes that within the world of the show, the original season had begun life as a scrappier, lo-fi project that caught enough viral attention for Netflix to buy the rights and polish it up. This provides a quick and clean justification for both the incongruously high production values of the supposedly-DIY project and how the teen documentarians could find themselves embroiled in such a similarly elaborate scatological-prank-with-surprisingly-dark-undertones-at-a-high-school scenario. With the network hungry for more content and fans submitting pranks by the dozens for the follow-up, the guys got to cherry-pick the best one to fit their fledgling brand, and they could not have picked much better.

The new crime is definitely in the same wheelhouse where you can mine humor from how seriously the investigators are forced to take their spot-checks of intricate theories of potential motives against the immutable postulate that “poop is funny”. And the scale is such that it can both seem like a huge deal within the affected community and also scan as “harmless” enough that it could have been pulled off by some dumb kid(s). But it changes just enough to maintain the very specific character of the show without repetition rendering things immediately stale. Having the prank revolve around poop provides for a similar vein of juvenile humor without repeating the exact same dick jokes, while switching from a public school to a tony Catholic academy shifts the focus to the other end of the high school spectrum. And with it, we get a similar shift in the primary suspect. Where the first season focused on a kid the entire school system had pre-emptively written off as a loss, such that he could be railroaded with hardly a second thought, this year flips the script by examining a student whose success is so pre-ordained that the entire community is invested in keeping it from derailing. The two crimes, and accused, are very different, but in both cases the unwillingness of their teachers and peers to challenge the story of who those guys are supposed to be obscures a more serious crime.

I don’t want to give away too much about the mystery, which is as sneakily well-conceived and clever in its twists as the first. But it managed to surprise me at several points despite going in with more expectations and a lookout for upcoming twists. At the outset, I was fairly sure that the friendly girl who brought the guys in to the story was going to turn out to be a deranged fangirl who staged the whole thing to try to hijack some of the AV spotlight. Later on, when the show started hinting at the possibility of a secret puppetmaster framing or coercing multiple suspects into being poopcomplices to the crimes, I convinced myself that it would be Dylan Maxwell, having gone full supervillain embracing the label that the first season had thrust upon him. I’m glad to report that I was wrong, the show was smarter than me at all times, and the final resolution is as resonant and nuanced as the first's ending, while being wise enough not to try to recreate the exact sort of ambiguity that worked so well the first time.

Netflix declined to pick up American Vandal for a third season, to the chagrin of many fans and critics. But I honestly don’t mind; they have mined the premise for more than I ever thought possible.  It got to go out at the height of its powers, a peerless and shockingly deep example of parody that fully earns the label of satire.


Watch It For: The way that truly dumb jokes can sneak up on you when don’t realize that you’ve spent the last 10 minutes fully engrossed in untangling the timelines and potential motives surrounding someone filling a T-shirt cannon with cat poo.