This Premise was Interesting. This Show was a Failure
Honestly had never heard of Nathan Fielder or Benny Safdie. I watched this simply because of Emma Stone. It is a dark satire and it is moody and off-putting in direction, music, camera placement, so they do a great job capturing the feeling that you are watching a world that is 'off' and not normal. Unfortunately, that is not a great choice because none of the main characters is sympathetic enough for us to feel that they don't belong in this world. All three of them have something in common: they don't like themselves. Two of them are shallow and awkward, the third (Asher) is not a bad person, but he is so uncomfortable in his own skin, and relationships, and environment that he is not a good person either. He is a lost soul, wondering around among good and bad, not really having faith rooted in anything.
So if the three protagonists don't like themselves, they can't truly like each other, and we can't truly like any of them. So we just watch them stumble along this path without any empathy.
I can say that there were four or five episodes of this show, where I started to nod off, or I had to realize I had quit paying attention to the dialogue, and I had to rewind to watch again. It is a huge problem...Fielder should not have directed this show. He doesn't know when to pace scenes, and he drags things out so slowly that you become bored. Scenes go on to long. Silent moments, holding onto the camera view for too long,...it literally was putting me to sleep. One black child actor completely mumbled her lines, and I had to rewind and add captions every line she said.
The most openly 'funny' scene of this show was where Asher was in a comedy class (because he was so awkward and stiff in the fake House Flipping show that his wife suggested he take a comedy class). Asked to make people laugh only with his face, he breaks out into a goofy, mugging 3rd grader. Every other joke on this show is so laid back and chill and 'did you catch the satire' that again you get bored. For example...getting a gift from a Native American, Whitney (Stone) notices that this Native American object is 'made in China'. She is horrified but has to deal with that subtly. Ha. Ha.
That is most of the humor. Kudos to the concept...somewhat rare in the 2020s...of actually mocking the 'Limousine Liberal' and the HGTV culture that pushes political correctness, and how that inhibits comedy itself.
Whitney is the high point of this. She is so completely awkward and unable to relate in an honest fashion with anyone because all her energy is spent walking the narrow path of liberal orthodoxy. At a certain point in the show, she openly devolves into a needy child and I thought that that would be some epiphany, but instead it wasn't really followed up with. Dougie (Safdie) plays a pompous, mean-spirited, oblivious drug and alcohol abuser. His dark past history seems to haunt him, but again this never comes to a resolution. Asher, who's biggest negative seems a fairly normal concern with finances and money, leans on the trappings of his Jewish faith with what seems no real belief, since a curse put on him by a Schoolgirl haunts him. That curse by the end of the show just kind of peters out as to what it meant, and if this young girl was actually a vehicle for some dark force.
The show ends with a Magical Realism occurrence. I guess we can say that Asher's predicament was resolved in some fashion. But to me...it was just a weird end that left unresolved most of the plot points that led us to the end. For me, Asher was such a one-note nebbish character that his fate seemed less relevant than the other two. If he had been either a better or worse person, than maybe his fate would have been more befitting.
More or less at the end of this, I would say the time and concentration spent hoping that this story would come together somehow was wasted. I don't think this was worth watching.
So if the three protagonists don't like themselves, they can't truly like each other, and we can't truly like any of them. So we just watch them stumble along this path without any empathy.
I can say that there were four or five episodes of this show, where I started to nod off, or I had to realize I had quit paying attention to the dialogue, and I had to rewind to watch again. It is a huge problem...Fielder should not have directed this show. He doesn't know when to pace scenes, and he drags things out so slowly that you become bored. Scenes go on to long. Silent moments, holding onto the camera view for too long,...it literally was putting me to sleep. One black child actor completely mumbled her lines, and I had to rewind and add captions every line she said.
The most openly 'funny' scene of this show was where Asher was in a comedy class (because he was so awkward and stiff in the fake House Flipping show that his wife suggested he take a comedy class). Asked to make people laugh only with his face, he breaks out into a goofy, mugging 3rd grader. Every other joke on this show is so laid back and chill and 'did you catch the satire' that again you get bored. For example...getting a gift from a Native American, Whitney (Stone) notices that this Native American object is 'made in China'. She is horrified but has to deal with that subtly. Ha. Ha.
That is most of the humor. Kudos to the concept...somewhat rare in the 2020s...of actually mocking the 'Limousine Liberal' and the HGTV culture that pushes political correctness, and how that inhibits comedy itself.
Whitney is the high point of this. She is so completely awkward and unable to relate in an honest fashion with anyone because all her energy is spent walking the narrow path of liberal orthodoxy. At a certain point in the show, she openly devolves into a needy child and I thought that that would be some epiphany, but instead it wasn't really followed up with. Dougie (Safdie) plays a pompous, mean-spirited, oblivious drug and alcohol abuser. His dark past history seems to haunt him, but again this never comes to a resolution. Asher, who's biggest negative seems a fairly normal concern with finances and money, leans on the trappings of his Jewish faith with what seems no real belief, since a curse put on him by a Schoolgirl haunts him. That curse by the end of the show just kind of peters out as to what it meant, and if this young girl was actually a vehicle for some dark force.
The show ends with a Magical Realism occurrence. I guess we can say that Asher's predicament was resolved in some fashion. But to me...it was just a weird end that left unresolved most of the plot points that led us to the end. For me, Asher was such a one-note nebbish character that his fate seemed less relevant than the other two. If he had been either a better or worse person, than maybe his fate would have been more befitting.
More or less at the end of this, I would say the time and concentration spent hoping that this story would come together somehow was wasted. I don't think this was worth watching.
- jamfitz001
- Jul 3, 2024