There is so much media being created and distributed these days, it would be a fool’s errand to try and keep up with everything. Hell, Netflix’s Marvel shows alone are more than enough to keep a binge-happy viewer locked down for a couple of weeks, and the streaming service churns out new shows and movies at a breakneck pace, rarely slowing down to give any of their wares any kind of ostentatious release (excepting of course those television shows involving children and dad-bod’d law enforcement agents battling interdimensional evil).
So as 2017 winds to a close and we make ready to burn this fucking nightmare clownshow of a year down and piss on the ashes, I wanted to take a second to highlight a couple of Netflix shows that may have passed you by. While the shows are wildly different in terms of form and story, they are very much alike in not only overall quality (being two of the funniest things I’ve seen all year) but in the way their love for puerile/juvenile/infantile humor belies real sincerity and empathy towards their characters and viewers.
Yes, somehow this year Netflix put out two different shows that use cartoon dicks to capture the melancholy of American adolescence. Fucking 2017, man, someone shoulda sold tickets.
Both American Vandal and Big Mouth are simultaneously easy sells and unappealing concepts. American Vandal is a mockumentary parody of true crime sensations like Making a Murderer, The Jinx, Serial, etc., with a couple of high school kids using the format to explore whether or not dumbass class clown Dylan (Jimmy Tatro) was responsible for spray-painting 27 dicks on 27 cars in the faculty parking lot, or if Dylan was framed and expelled for someone else’s crime.
Big Mouth, meanwhile, is an animated coming-of-age comedy that follows best friends Nick (Nick Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney) as they begin to experiment with their burgeoning adolescence with all kinds of sticky consequences, many of which are brought on by the Hormone Monster (Kroll again [honestly, entire scenes of this show turn into an echo chamber of Kroll talking to Kroll while other Krolls chime in. It’s a mirror maze of Nick Kroll]).
Right away, you can see the potential and the pitfalls behind both concepts. True crime is nigh-inescapable these days, so using that structure to instead detail something as willfully silly as dick-based graffiti, with a bevy of meathead high school kids as suspects/investigators, would seem like a decent idea for a Funny or Die short. But 10 episodes, at a half hour a pop? That already sounds like much too much.
And it’s not like there is any shortage of cartoons about horny young dickheads having gross adventures. South Park has been on for longer than probably most of South Park’s current target audience has been alive. When you factor in Big Mouth’s love for twisting pop culture totems to disgusting extremes, it sounds more or less like something that Adult Swim would churn out for a couple years in the background while focusing on printing as much Rick & Morty money as possible.
So what made these shows not only succeed, but actually transcend the inherent thinness of their premises?
Part of is just executional. If you’re going to do a silly idea, you better at least have the stones to commit to the damn thing, and both American Vandal and Big Mouth delivered in spades.
Throughout its 10 episodes, American Vandal is constantly highlighting the absurdity of its own premise, as more than a few adults and fellow students point out to intrepid school reporters Peter (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam (Griffin Gluck) that doing a Serial-style docudrama investigation into a dick-drawing conspiracy is a terrible, terrible idea. That acknowledgment, coupled with recurring references to the logical kinds of limitations that these kids would encounter as they to investigate this case/make this show, give American Vandal juuuuuuuust enough of a grounding in reality that you stay invested in the case even as the question of #WhoDrewTheDicks spirals into loopier and loopier theories and reveals. It helps that the appropriation of true crime technique is note-perfect, while being near-surgical in just how precisely it bends and tweaks the existing formula to its own deeply silly bent.
And maybe American Vandal’s first secret weapon is that “Who Drew the Dicks” is a shockingly engaging mystery once you get past the inherent silliness of it. Which takes some doing. I’m still sorta laughing about it as I type this out, honestly. I mean…it’s a bunch of drawings of dicks! On teachers’ cars! LOL. But, anyway, the performances of Alvarez, Gluck, and especially Tatro as poor, dumb Dylan, sell this investigation as having genuine stakes while the various cliques and groups of high school are a natural fit for a mystery story where everyone knows more than what they’re saying (something Rian Johnson also exploited to tremendous effect with his debut film, Brick).
Big Mouth, on the other hand, isn’t satisfied with just being a raunchy cartoon. It goes so far, with such unblinking mania and glee, that I honestly don’t know how Netflix signed off on some of it, unless it turns out that Nick Kroll has boxes of compromising photographs the execs would rather not get out. Honestly, if you stack a cast full of Kroll, Mulaney, Jason Mantzoukas, Fred Armisen, Jenny Slate, Maya Rudolph, acclaimed filmmaker Jordan Peele, Kristen Wiig as a young girl’s genitals, Kristen Bell as a pillow that Mantzoukas keeps fucking…look, things are going to get weird. Big Mouth takes things to such extremes that there are images in the finale that made me legitimately gag, even as I kept laughing.
Kroll and company are smart enough to keep the laughs coming at pretty much all times, and the animated nature of the show means that they aren’t constrained by the limits of time or space, which Big Mouth utilizes to turn puberty into a magical/surreal vista of weirdness for our characters to navigate. The show’s biggest go-tos are Kroll as the Hormone Monster and Rudolph as the Hormone Monstress, who reappear again and again to urge the kids at the center of Big Mouth to indulge in all their most deranged adolescent urges. Kroll’s Hormone Monster in particular is utilized as a kind of demented, horny Hobbes, egging on unsuspecting Calvins as they get to know their nascent biology.
Not that the show is all gleeful cackling over whatever gross shit Kroll and his friends convinced Netflix into dumping tons of money into animating. Big Mouth’s scripts are densely packed with zingers and banters, with the extraordinarily talented cast deliver with aplomb. Dead center in all this is the friendship between Nick and Andrew (inspired, as were many of the stories featured in Big Mouth’s first season, by Nick Kroll’s actual childhood), and the real-life friendship between Kroll and Mulaney makes their cartoon rapport flow like magic. If Big Mouth had opted to be a more straightforward, even live-action, sort of Boy Meets World/Wonder Years/Goldbergs nostalgia trip, I think the material is strong enough that it would have worked. But, hey, animated means they can get super fucked up with it, and so here we are.
But, OK, so Big Mouth and American Vandal are funny shows. Big deal. And so they get a lot of mileage out of gags that probably should wear real thin real quick. So what? What separates either show from the dozens of other programs cluttering up your DVR and/or queue?
It’s that both shows have a shocking level of sincerity and sweetness only slightly underneath the immediacy of their lunatic exteriors. While American Vandal never really stops giggling at the dick-based nature of the crime, as it wears on it begins to dig into the impact that the show-within-the-show is having on Dylan, on the investigators, and on the school at large, and it really doesn’t flinch from how raw things get. American Vandal at times becomes a deeply poignant examination of how teenagers both use and are abused by their media, as narratives are shaped and opinions are formed based only on anecdotes and faulty perceptions.
When Peter and Sam start kicking up dirt looking for ‘the truth’, their actions have very real consequences for themselves and the people around them, and to its credit, American Vandal doesn’t let either boy off the hook for it. Somehow, a show about a bunch of teachers’ cars being vandalized with cartoon cocks gradually morphs into a genuinely affecting story about the way teenagers are taught to construct identities for themselves, only for those identities to turn around and consume them. The finale’s reveals (which I will not spoil here) prove to be genuinely heartbreaking, as you watch kids who you have come to know and care about crash upon the twin rocks of teenagers’ unthinking cruelty and adults’ very conscientious cruelty.
If American Vandal has a melancholy underpinning its silliness, Big Mouth has a sweetness and an honesty that keep its manic punchlines and surreal imagery grounded to something recognizably human. I mentioned earlier that the central friendship between Andrew and Nick in Big Mouth is inspired by Nick Kroll’s actual early friendships. Well, so is much of the rest of the show, including an early episode where one of Nick and Andrew’s friends experiences her first period while on a field trip inside the Statue of Liberty. While Kroll and his team take this to absurdist lengths (climaxing with an anthropomorphic tampon singing a R.E.M. parody number [look, I didn’t make the freaking show]) the jokes are rooted in the situation, not at the expense of the girl in question.
There’s a gentleness to much of how Big Mouth approaches these matters, and it’s especially refreshing how much time is given over to the feminine side of adolescence. There’s not an ounce of scold in Big Mouth as it depicts kids, often scared and lonely and at a loss as to how to communicate those feelings to their friends and families, making lousy choices and indulging in impulses that they just don’t have the tools to deal with yet. And while Big Mouth is sex-positive through and through, it tackles important subjects like consent with clear eyes and an unerring moral compass.
Phrases like ‘Peak TV’ get tossed around a lot, usually as a complaint about the sheer tonnage of programming that exists. And hell yeah it can be frustrating when every person you know has a list of five shows that you Totally Need To Check Out Right Now (Don’t Worry, It Gets Good After the First 37 Hours). But the upshot of this incredibly permissive age we live in is that smart creators can create idiosyncratic oddities that really wouldn’t have had a place to air, or access to resources that would allow them to exist at the high quality level that they do today.
Both American Vandal and Big Mouth feel like flukes, like glitches in the matrix that somehow squeaked out into the waking world. And whatever their grand or modest ambitions, they are two shows that made me laugh very hard, very consistently, and came away from feeling tremendous amounts of warmth for all involved in front of and behind the camera.
And in 2017, man, you can’t really ask for better than that.
