BEST OF 2018 - BOJACK HORSEMAN IS STILL THE BEST SATIRE IN THE WORLD

3.  BOJACK HORSEMAN (NETFLIX)

Bojack has reached a point where it's becoming easy to take its brilliance for granted. To accept its dizzying wordplay as de rigeur. The precise and ruthless vivisections of Hollywoo(d) culture as standard smelling-own-farts metacomedy.  The emotionally raw pits the characters reach as scheduled stops on their seasonal journeys, rather than miracles of real characterization developed without slowing the gag-a-second pace of outlandish puns, visual gags, drug humor, stupid names and honest to god jokes that make it a real contender for funniest show on the air, as well as the saddest, and the most perversely honest.

This season is dipping slightly in the rankings because a spare few elements didn’t entirely work. The pair of vaudevillian popsicle-stick joke writers fell flatter than any gag in the life of the show, and crude (in construction and functionality) sexbot Henry Fondle seemed designed to pogo from abject stupidity to hilariously-inspired stupidity, but spent too much time on the abject end of that spectrum. And let’s be honest, part of the problem with him is that his bits tried to mine the same vein of comic antilogic as the show’s most singularly hilarious creation, and Henry can’t measure up to even two of the children in Vincent Adultman’s oversized trenchcoat, much less the third. What man, or machine, possibly could?

If the sexbot’s rise through the corporate ranks didn’t succeed at bringing the sharpened absurdity that the show had previously trained on abortion or gun control debates to the #MeToo arena, the season did find more productive angles from which to approach the what is certainly the defining issue of the era for the entertainment industry, if not for all of society. Their Mel Gibson analogue tees things off nicely, and dropping in the Forgivies awards as a longstanding staple of Hollywoo is the kind of satire where the matter-of-factness gives it a keener edge.

But it's Bojack’s new gig as the eponymous, gritty antihero Philbert that provides the spine of the season and ties it all together.  It introduces us to great new characters in Stephanie Beatriz’s love interest/costar, a talented performer who has maybe learned her place in the Hollywoo pecking order a little too well, and Rami Malek’s showrunner, so convinced by his own tortured artist schtick that he’s…well, basically what I imagine Nick Pizzolatto is like in person. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bojack produced the best satire of the antihero-driven prestige drama we’ve seen in the two decades those shows have dominated the airwaves/Emmys. And while I remain a total mark for such offerings (spoiler alert, there's one at the top of this very list), they have certainly developed enough  pretensions and overused tropes to make them ripe for parody. But the thing about Bojack’s send-ups, of not just TV but everything really, is that it is brutal but also understanding. While utter disgust can be good for a couple vicious burns, I don’t think you can do any extended form of satire without a real understanding of the appeal of the thing being satirized.

What elevates Philbert is how it doesn’t just mock  the tropes of an under-parodied genre. It extends that understanding to tie together the entire season’s theme, and present a life-imitates-art feedback loop where men’s bad behind-the-scenes behavior reflects into men’s bad behavior in the scenes which result in an elaborate apologia excusing such bad behavior across the board. It paints an incisive portrait of how personal, artistic, and corporate dysfunction all have a way of developing elaborate ecosystems of justification to sustain themselves, all nesting within and feeding off each other.  But it’s not just moralistic finger-wagging. Bojack isn’t lashing out at another genre, it’s implicating itself along with it (which seems only fair, as I’ve previously written about how favorably that it stacks up against antihero dramas on their own terms). It understands all too well why the entertainments, and justifications, appeal to damaged people and systems.  And in the end, there are still no pat answers about how to balance the need for society to confront patriarchal abuse more forcefully and the moral imperatives to forgive and foster actual growth where it can be found.  

But there are a lot of really, really good jokes.  And why do we even make jokes, if not because they are the next best thing to answers?

Watch It For: "Free Churro" is getting all the attention as the standout episode this year, but for my money, the follow up "INT. SUB", which filter's our usual gang's dysfunction through the unwitting perspectives (and weak attempts at professional confidentiality) of Diane's therapist and her wife, is the best entry.  It works with the visual whimsy that animation provides, where the staginess  of "Churro" works against it.  

BEST OF 2018 - BIG MOUTH IS NASTY AND NICE

4.  BIG MOUTH (NETFLIX)

Big Mouth is dirty. Like, really dirty. As in, the filthiest show on TV by a substantial margin. But it is also an object lesson in how dirty does not have to mean heartless.  Big Mouth is also perhaps the most empathetic show on TV.  By externalizing all of the characters’ worst impulses into various monsters and spirits and talking pubes constantly hissing and grunting terrible advice into their ears, it keeps them sympathetic no matter how filthy or selfish their actions become. This year saw the Ghost of Duke Ellington phased out, probably as much because of Jordan Peele’s limited availability as because he turned out to be rather superfluous as a source of bad suggestions with the all the hormone monsters running around.

But in his place, we got the Shame Wizard, which was a perfect addition and counterpoint to the perpetual grunting and shrieking encouragement of the hormone monsters. David Thewlis is the perfect voice for the embodiment of shame and self-doubt, at once oily and horribly, British-ly logical, but also nailing the exasperated and wounded notes when called for. Also perfect: the autographed photo of Septa Unella on the wall of his office in the Department Of Puberty. Less perfect is John Gemberling’s intentionally but utterly insufferable and stunted hormone monster, but even he has his moments.

All these spirits and horny devils on the kids’ shoulders are not just raunchy joke machines, though Lord knows they produce those at a firehouse clip. They also demonstrate a more sophisticated examination of sex in the #MeToo era than you would expect from a joke-a-minute dirty cartoon. That’s an incredibly positive movement, don’t get me wrong, but at its most zealous and clumsiest points it can engender a feeling that sex or desire itself has been criminalized. And what Big Mouth and its monsters say is not just that everyone gets horny, and so anything goes. The characters are always, ultimately, accountable for how they behave, but the monsters literalize the idea that even fundamentally good people are only able to be “good” in constant defiance of their own natures.  It’s a compassionate perspective that goes deeper than boners, as the monsters voice not just the horniness, but all the shame, jealousy, fear, and selfishness the characters have no choice but to feel as they sheepishly shuffle toward adulthood. Because those monsters, even the seemingly-villainous Shame Wizard, are not presented as Bad Guys to be defeated.  They are just facts of life, fellow passengers that may be bad influences, but it's not until the kids act on that advice that any talk of good/bad guys and girls starts entering into it.

But to get back to the filth, whoooo boy is it filthy. Much of it explicitly, but it also constantly proves Patton Oswalt’s point that you can be gross without using swearwords. If I never hear a more disturbing euphemism for sex than “make thick in her warm”, that’s probably for the best.

Watch It For: Maya Rudolph’s incredible cadences as Connie the Hormone Monstress. If the Emmy’s gave awards for single line deliveries, as they should, she would win them all just for how she bounces out the syllables of “bubble bath”. To say nothing of “pharmacy”, which comes out as something like fuh-wyarm-azz-zee

BEST OF 2018 - BROCKMIRE MAKES HIMSELF AT HOME IN THE BIG EASY

6.  BROCKMIRE (IFC)

Brockmire was my favorite surprise of last year.  What seemed like a one-note premise (Hank Azaria says dirty things in a cornpone baseball announcer voice) turned out to be much deeper than expected in every way.  Comedically, the show found a surprisingly clever and wryly philosophically voice, and made the lead’s hedonism grounded enough to be believable while still absurd enough to be hysterical.  Dramatically, it grounded his various addictions in actual humanity and created a surprisingly sincere, adult love story with a near-equal of a trainwreck.  And cinematically, it developed a quietly pretty sepia look that was understated but distinct from any other comedy out there. 

The second season was a slight step down from the first, if only because Amanda Peet was missed so much as a regular presence (not that she didn’t make her limited appearances count). Focusing on the relationship between Brockmire and his young handler/business partner was the next best available thing, but it could never match the poignancy of the romance he never expected to find as a has-been drunk in a has-been town shifting its primary industry from steel to meth production.  But credit where it’s due for the show committing to such a major change in the status quo.  And for picking New Orleans as the new locale, which is an even better setting for a devotedly debauched character who affectionately refers to it as “where the Devil goes to get his dick sucked”. 

This season took Brockmire to some impressive and depressing new lows, but always remained true to the character and consistently hilarious.  In spite of some very stiff competition, this was the show that had the best “bitter eulogy for a difficult parent” scene of the year – while lacking the structural grandstanding of Bojack’s standout episode, Jim’s is more directly to the point and the lapsed Catholic in me delights at the gumption to just tell a minister to his face that “no offense, but that was some straight up, zero-calorie baby food you were spooning out up there.” And despite the existence of every episode of Big Mouth, it had the funniest masturbation scene of the year, with its very different kind of pitcher’s duel.

If I have any real reservation about the season, it’s that it seems like they actually progressed the character too far, particularly in the far-reaching finale.  It feels like a wholly appropriate ending for Brockmire, but I’m not sure there what the show looks like with Jim getting sober. It's actually one of two comedies on this list which ended with its self-destructive protagonist taking similarly positive steps that would seem to endanger the basic comedic appeal of those characters.  But creator Joel Church-Cooper professes to have a plan for the next two seasons that IFC has ordered, and I haven’t got very far doubting this show so far. 

See It For:  Brockmire’s savage, never-really-explained feud with a minor league crawfish mascot, probably my single favorite recurring gag of the year.

BEST OF 2018 - CORPORATE IS NOT TOPICAL, BUT VERY TIMELY

8.  CORPORATE (COMEDY CENTRAL)

You’re never going to find a darker sitcom than this, which is like if you took the absurdist workplace comedy of 30 Rock (or for a deeper cut, the brilliant-but-cancelled Better Off Ted) and set it in Edward Norton’s soul-sucking office from Fight Club. There is of course no shortage of dark comedies on TV these days, not to mention this list. But most are dark in the sense that they basically want to be dramas. Corporate is dark because it is thoroughly and deeply nihilistic, and all its stories and jokes flow from that.

Nihilism is a tricky foundation for comedy, as it could easily lend itself to the haughtiness or stridency of a newly-minted atheist sophomore.  And if the show felt like it had something to prove about this darkness, it would quickly become insufferable.  But it strikes a matter-of-fact tone that treats the fundamental meaninglessness of existence as a bedrock assumption rather than a thesis to be argued, which is a shrewd tonal posture.  It's bracing material, but the show at least respects the audience's intelligence enough not to pretend that it is telling us anything we don't already know about the acute inhumanity of corporate culture.  It knows that we, and its characters, have seen plenty of Fight Clubs and Office Spaces, and we/they still chose to accept the machine instead of raging against it, since we'd "rather be miserable in a one-bedroom apartment than chase my dreams in a studio."  If the show has any truth bombs to drop in regards to this life, it's only that this the "real" world isn't much less full of shit or rewarding than the cubicle, so that sort of calculation is actually distressingly sensible.

Again, this could be completely acidic stuff, but Corporate cuts the darkness with plentiful absurdity that combines with that cold-blooded tone to make the jokes to hit harder and avoids that fatal sense of self-seriousness.   And the combination of silliness and pessimism also makes it weirdly timely for 2018. While the show was presumably in development for several years, the droll, hungover vibe could not have felt more appropriate for a year that basically started from the assumption that God was clearly dead and if anything had ever mattered, it clearly hadn’t for a good long while now.

I’m not making any of this sound very appealing, I know. But it’s such a funny show, and its utter commitment to its cold comic logic becomes oddly charming. I was certain that logic was too offputting to find a wide audience, but I was recently surprised first to see promos indicating that it would return for a second season next month, and then at how much I was actually looking forward to revisiting Hampton Deville. It is an underlit moral wasteland, where the best (like Aparna Nancherla’s acerbic HR rep) lack all conviction and the worst (Lance Reddick’s terrifying CEO and his fawning junior executives) are full of passionate corporate intensity. But it makes me laugh a lot. That’s all I have. That and the folder on my work computer labeled “Porn For When I’m Angry”.


See It For: Premeditated Swan Murder

 

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.