#6 - Review
Aired 2014-2017 (3 seasons) on Comedy Central
Created by Andy Daly and Charlie Siskel
Currently streaming on Comedy Central (cc.com)
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Have you watched The Office? Of course you have because you are a person who is alive in 2019. This means you've probably seen the sixth-season episode "Scott's Tots." The now-infamous installment features Michael Scott in his most painfully awkward moment. After over-confidently promising a group of school children college tuition when he was younger, he has to deliver the news that now he's a middle manager who can only provide them with laptop...batteries. In a show whose trademark is cringe comedy, "Scott's Tots" is the gold standard.
Review is also a show that specializes in discomfort. Co-creator Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a man whose job is to review life experiences and assign them a star rating for his eponymous show-within-a-show. That Forrest forces himself to experience life to an absurd and unnatural degree makes for an inherently awkward atmosphere. But what makes it something entirely distinct from (and better than) The Office is that every single episode is "Scott's Tots."
The best way to illustrate this is to attempt to identify Review's own "Scott's Tots" (Scott's Tots Prime, perhaps). Different people will give different answers, but for me the obvious choice is the middle segment of the second-season premiere. While recovering from a gunshot wound (don't ask), Forrest falls in love with his nurse, played by the wonderful Allison Tolman of Fargo fame. As he settles down into a life as calm and stable as we've seen for him, he receives his next assignment from the show: reviewing blackmail. Because he hasn't spent his life collecting intelligence on valuable assets, he turns his efforts towards his newfound love and her tendency to occasionally steal pain medication from the hospital. This situation sounds excruciating enough on its own, but it's the execution that turns the pain up to eleven. Her sheer disbelief at Forrest (did I mention that Tolman is wonderful) and her generous assumption that he just needs a bit of money only makes Forrest's doubling down two weeks later (while they are cuddling in bed!) a tougher pill to swallow. When Forrest finishes off the segment with "Our relationship was in trouble and it was blackmail's fault," you know more than ever that you are in the hands of an evil genius.
Lest you get the impression that the show consists purely of dark humor, I can assure you there is also an abundance of guilt-free laughs. Much of this comes from the absurdity of the situations Forrest places himself in. Vigorously shaking an eight-ball hidden in his fanny pack, declaring himself a "fuck-beast" at an orgy, and showing up to a custody hearing dressed as Batman are examples that just scratch the surface. But the most consistently hilarious part of the show is Forrest's ongoing narration of his reviews. Some of this is in the matter-of-fact way he describes the absurdity at hand*, and some of it is the way Andy Daly delivers every line as a man possessed by a solitary goal. He may be excited, or joyous, or nervous, or desperate, but he's always committed to the task at hand no matter the consequences. And perhaps most importantly, it's this manner of joke delivery that allows Review to comment on its own absurdity without necessarily hanging a flashing neon sign on it.
*My favorite is from the pillow fight review where he prefaces it by saying "Unlike most pillow fights, this one would have to take place in a county jail, where I was awaiting trial for murder." But the blackmail review I just described is also amazing because he starts it with "no amount of painkillers could anesthetize me from what I would have to do next."
To be approximately the sixth-best program of the decade though, Review has to be something more than just uniquely hilarious. Put another way, the cruelty has to have a point. Perhaps that point is the show's ongoing commentary on the foolishness of leading a life of constant critique. The series speaks to this in ways both small (the show establishes that Forrest can't give something zero stars, so he gives racism 1/2 a star) and large (Forrest literally ruins his life by reviewing it). The problem is that the show itself sums this up in just two effortless lines, leaving little else for me to say. At the start of every episode, Forrest welcomes us as sociopathically as possible with "Life, it's literally all we have....but is it any good?" And when he's lost and feared dead at the end of season two, his much more well-adjusted co-host A.J. ends things by saying "Life: You're already living it. Ain't it great?" That's pretty much the whole game right there.
What gives Review its soul then, is something else. Something that is not only more interesting and relevant to a wider audience, but also a topic about which the show has more to say. That something is Forrest's attitude towards his work, and how it consumes him to the point of oblivion.
The centrality of this theme becomes clear in the show's first few minutes when Forrest takes a small pleasure from his life (malted milk balls) and turns it into work (he steals them in order to review stealing). This is purposefully minor but also subtly meaningful and prepares us for how the show will gradually strip Forrest's personal life from him, bit by bit. And while the duties of the job become all-encompassing for Forrest, the show never quite paints the work itself as an inherent evil. The early episodes go so far as to show positive outcomes from some of the reviews. Forrest's foray into making a sex tape actually draws him closer to his wife, and his quest to eat 30 pancakes helps him to find some measure of solace. Of course he's sad in the first place because the show made him divorce his wife, so we're not exactly missing the forest for the trees here.
What Review does consider insidious is Forrest's desire to find meaningfulness in life primarily through his work. This is also clear at the beginning as Forrest declares "if we do this right, we'll shine new light on what it means to be alive." And while Forrest is never quite let of the hook for his ceaseless dedication, Review pretty pointedly shows that his producer/boss Grant is the primary instigator of this ethos. "This could be your penicillin" he says early on, comparing the discovery of a life-saving drug to eating a lot of pancakes. "Viewers need this, America needs this, the world needs this" he says while trying to convince Forrest to stay faithful to the show. But Grant saves his hardest sell for the finale. When convincing Forrest to fully abandon his family, he suggests that there might exist a review "that blows all the others out of the water" and that the faint hope of making his son proud is worth more than actually spending time with him. Forrest may become a monster, but in the world of Review, Frankenstein is the name of the doctor that created the monster.
Because of this external pressure, Forrest has little choice but to internalize his devotion. But instead of the cold, rational reasoning that Grant lays out, Forrest's dedication takes the form of an almost religious fervor. Forrest repeatedly says that the show helps people, even though we have no indication of who those people are or how it would possibly help them. He calls the job his family even though it gives nothing back to him and separates him from his actual family. When he mistakenly believes that he has to be cryogenically frozen for a review he exhibits pure faith that the show will rescue him ("I considered that this show had always miraculously spared me so that I could go on living life in order to review it, and I prayed my show would save me again"). And when he makes his final decision to choose the show over his previous life, the transformation is complete. "I was put on the earth to do this," Forrest says as a fully converted practitioner of the religion of Review.
What allows all this to work as a critique of the ethos of vocational devotion is how clearly everything in the world of Review is artifice. In life you may hear people spew false motivations like Grant does, or you may suspect everything is a conspiracy or prank like Forrest thinks, but you never really have all the answers. But the finale of Review gives us a definitive conclusion. Grant confesses that no one watched the show, the ratings were awful, and "Review" is now cancelled. This leaves Forrest in literal disbelief. He's still convinced what he's doing is real and that it matters, but we know he's all alone pacing in front of the show's signature blue backdrop, an uncanny void that now more than ever signifies nothing. Earlier in the series it's made clear that one of the rules of the show is that Forrest can't tell anyone what is and isn't a part of the show. After maintaining that illusion for so long, the final irony is that he can't even tell himself what's real anymore. Forrest's life's work is now his life, and that life is nothing.
In spite of this, Review does not have a nihilistic worldview nor is it wrought with pessimism. Even though Forrest's life is inevitably destroyed by his work, the series still shows us a path to genuine self-actualization. I mentioned earlier that co-host A.J.'s sense of optimism was what cut through the show's cynical streak on the topic of over-analysis, and it serves the same purpose here. This is never more clear than in the show's penultimate episode when Forrest reviews being a co-host, which necessitates trading spots with A.J. While Forrest casually denigrates her life ("A.J's job clearly occupied a small place in her life," he says dismissively. "As a reviewer of life my role in the world is crucial. How could anyone do something as trivial as co-hosting?"), A.J. uses her opportunity as host to reflect and grow as a person. The challenge (slapping a stranger's ass) is as stupid as all the rest, but that's the point. When she realizes performing that act for the show would serve no purpose but to dehumanize her and everyone involved, she refuses. Her review ends without the usual star rating and in its place a simple "I didn't do it." A.J.'s already living the great life and we should all join her.
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