How Jordan Peele and Charlie Sanders’ Weird City Makes the Most of Stunt Casting
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Weird City, Charlie Sanders and Jordan Peele’s satirical sci-fi anthology about a “not too distant future” in which an unnamed metropolis has split itself in two, the Haves living Above the Line and the Have-Nots living Below (“Like, literally, they built a barrier between themselves called ‘The Line,’” a title card informs us), comprises just six episodes. These six episodes feature one-off guest turns from Awkwafina, Malcolm Barrett, Yvette Nicole Brown, LeVar Burton, Michael Cera, Auli’i Cravalho, Eugene Cordero, Laverne Cox, Rosario Dawson, Sara Gilbert, Mark Hamill, Trevor Jackson, Gillian Jacobs, Hannah Simone, Dylan O’Brien, Ed O’Neill, Matt Walsh and Steven Yeun. In six episodes. Six short episodes.
The stories these guest stars get caught up in vary wildly, but whether they’re contending with the busted algorithm of Burton’s The One That’s The One dating program, stealing an Above the Line delivery van to go on a child-”rescuing” safari in the middle-class slums Below the Line, or slowly becoming conscious of the harrowing fact that they’re characters in the finale of a premium-cable action series, the one thing performances all have in common is that they’re impossible to watch without seeing The Actor(s) first, and whatever character(s) they’re playing second (or, too easily, not at all).
From a critical standpoint, there are two ways to read this fact: Either Sanders and Peele are whizz auteurs using the loaded familiarity of real-world celebrity to add metatextual layers to their skewering of (anti-) social technology, America’s particularly #brand-happy flavor of socioeconomic elitism, and base human nature… or, they’re just unlucky enough that the impressively sprawling, of-the-moment cast of Weird City is hitting the (Internet) airwaves at the very moment that the blank check audiences have given other auteurs to stunt-cast their Big Television Projects has finally run out.
Immediately after finishing the episodes made available for review, my gut feeling was that the correct interpretation was the latter. Not to cast aspersions on their skills as actors, but in their roles as mistakenly matched ones-that-are-the-ones in the series premiere, Dylan O’Brien and Ed O’Neill are so distractingly Dylan O’Brien and Ed O’Neill that the real emotional warmth one might want to see in their story never fully materializes. Similarly impossible to parse is an episode about the trend-based one-upmanship corroding Gillian Jacobs, Malcolm Barrett, Hannah Simone and Steve Yeun’s Above-the-Line friend group. By the end of the episode, all four characters reach what is, apparently, an emotional breaking point brought on by the excesses of Above-the-Line trend-chasing, but the characterizations are so extremely shallow, and Jacobs, Barrett, Simone and Yuen all so eminently recognizable as themselves (or, at least, as the roles they played in each of their pop culture-defining franchises), that the the situational comedy they’re stuck in is only funny because it’s Steve Yeun obsessively toting around a melon in a sling, and Gillian Jacobs expressing ignorance over whether or not the dragons portrayed in Above-the-Line TV shows about life Below the Line are real or metaphorical. (She is fairly certain they’re metaphorical.)