Notes on a Vandal

Last month, Netflix announced that it had cancelled its once buzzed-about show American Vandal after two seasons. I'd just begun to watch it, making me officially late to the party. But Netflix is a massive bulldozer pushing dirt into a hole you're trying to climb out of, so the cancellation was also a bit of a relief: I could enjoy the 16 episodes of the show, and then move on.

American Vandal is in many ways a satire of Netflix itself, specifically one of its other buzzed-about shows, the documentary Making a Murderer. (Yes, I'm working through season 2 of that right now.) It's a parody of true crime documentaries, following two teenagers as they try to unravel implausibly dense conspiracies surrounding relatively low-stakes crimes in their high school. Season 1's case revolves around a student accused of vandalizing 27 faculty members' cars by spray-painting dicks on them. ("Who did the dicks?") Season 2 is about a series of traumatizing pranks all involving poop. ("Who is the Turd Burglar?")

You could almost watch American Vandal and not realize it's supposed to be funny. It slavishly adheres to the tropes of these deep-dive documentaries, things like Making a Murderer, the Paradise Lost trilogy, and (with the re-enactment footage added in season 2) Unsolved Mysteries and The Thin Blue Line. It's completely faithful in tone and structure, with only the subject matter betraying the true intent here (and the occasional hilarious bit of dialogue delivered with an utter lack of self-awareness).

American Vandal also wears a disguise in that it's actually a fairly legit teen drama, albeit in unconventional form for that genre. A lot of it revolves around the social pressures of adolescence, and the characters really are sympathetic even though they're often larger-than-life. The meta-commentary aspect of the story, more than the parody, is what seemed to earned the critics' praise of the show.

Those same critics mostly seem to say that season 1 was the surprise-out-of-nowhere gem, while season 2 was a surprisingly-good-but-not-as-great follow up. I personally would disagree. I suppose it depends on what draws you in, but I found season 2 to be the far more overtly funny of the two, and thus the one I preferred.

One thing I think is certain, though. If you've ever watched a true crime documentary, especially one made to try to exonerate the innocent, the parody of American Vandal will almost certainly appeal to you. I'd give Season 1 a B- and Season 2 a B+, averaging the whole thing out to a B. It's a low commitment by Netflix standards -- 8 episodes in each season, each one just half an hour, and now concluded. It's perhaps not the "can't praise it enough" jewel that is Santa Clarita Diet, but I think some of my readers will enjoy it.