The body count keeps going up on television’s most gleefully black comedy. “Road Rage, Orgy” wasn’t quite as dark as last week’s Review, but it still managed to incorporate one borderline negligent homicide, which I guess is what we should expect from Andy Daly and company by now. Having taken out a member of Forrest MacNeil’s immediate family in “Best Friend, Space,” it’s now clear that Review is playing by the same rules as Game of Thrones, where characters are only safe if their death wouldn’t be particularly shocking.
I thought there was a lot of potential in last night’s “Road Rage” segment, as Forrest MacNeil’s repressed anger and despair is one Review’s main gags, but I wish they would have taken it even farther. Even during the inspired “smash off” that had MacNeil and another motorist furiously destroying their own cars, it felt like Daly was holding back, nowhere near the coke-addled maniac we saw in the show’s first episode. However it was great to see the return of James Urbaniak’s cold-blooded producer, who got the best line of the night when he observed a pair of skid marks going off a cliff and calmly concluded, “He turned around and went that way.”
I found the second half of the episode more successful, if only for the little touches that sold the whole ridiculous scenario. MacNeil keeping his glasses on, the crowd’s chant of “In! Out! In! Out!” and the in-focus Venetian masks amid a sea of pixelated nude bodies all helped make the segment one of the funniest orgy scenes of recent memory. “Orgy” also gave Review an opportunity to indulge in a good deal of linguistic register switching, resulting in memorable phrases like “totally ball-draining” and “awesome pleasure hell.”
Overall, “Road Rage, Orgy” was a decent enough episode, but somewhat disappointing given that one of the show’s main draws is seeing MacNeil reach depraved new extremes each week. And while Review clearly hasn’t backed down any with its latest entry, it’s failed to surpass similar earlier segments like “Addiction” and “Space.” Hopefully the show’s writers haven’t run out of humiliations for its host/victim, but after six brutal episodes, it would be hard to blame them even if they had.