As alternative comedy’s go-to square, Andy Daly has played affable white dudes for years on shows like Delocated and Eastbound and Down, usually turning in skilled, if not particularly memorable performances. That’s been a shame, because his appearances on Scott Aukerman’s Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast make it clear Daly is something of a twisted comic genius. Whether voicing sleazy children’s theater producer Don Dimelo or suicidal human sausage Hot Dog, Daly’s characters consistently skew toward the dark and bizarre, a quality that rarely makes its way to his straight-laced television roles.
Until now, that is. While Daly has previously dabbled with the distance between a cheery appearance and a tortured psyche on Eastbound and Down and Reno 911! (where his character named Brad the Friendly Homeowner committed suicide, naturally), the comedy on his new series Review is almost entirely derived from the physical and emotional debasement of its lead, bookish critic Forrest MacNeil. Having tasked himself with answering the Big Questions by reviewing the breadth of life’s experiences, Daly’s MacNeil is at the mercy of his television audience’s often humiliating and dangerous suggestions, doing his best to maintain composure throughout.
With its weirdly artificial frame device, its easy to be put off by Review at first, but it later becomes clear that the joke isn’t really the reviews themselves, but the sad man in the middle of it all. Sure, each of the three review segments in “Stealing, Addiction, Prom” have their own funny moments, like the awkward silence when a cleaning woman walks in on Forrest’s bank robbery rehearsal, or when he ruins a Boy Scout outing high on the cocaine he calls “camping powder,” but the show’s true aim doesn’t reveal itself until the end of episode.
In the last few minutes, it becomes clear that the adverse effects of Forrest’s extreme reviewing have been cumulative, leaving him a drug-addled kleptomaniac on his way to a second stint in rehab. Forrest’s steady decline from content family man to complete train wreck actually makes Review Comedy Central’s most narrative-driven series in years, with a clear, downward-sloping arc. Of course, this becomes a lot more obvious when you see later episodes, notably week three’s “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes.”
All and all, “Stealing, Addiction, Prom” shows Review to be a daring dark comedy that could probably use a few more jokes. Because as exciting as it is to see Daly finally show off his considerable talents, much of the episode consists of scripted psuedo-pranks filmed in hand-held that just didn’t land for me. If you haven’t checked out Review, I’d definitely recommend that you do, especially as mileage may vary on the aforementioned shaky cam sequences. It’s hard to even name a similarly structured comedy (depending on how funny you think Kafka is) and Daly manages to get an amazing number of sad laughs out of his cosmic schlimazel.