Our Highest Rec: American Vandal Is Serial Meets Superbad
Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.
American Vandal sort of has some prerequisites, because it’s way better the more true-crime documentaries you’ve seen beforehand, like Making A Murderer and The Keepers, or the more crime-centric podcasts you’ve binged, like Serial or Up and Vanished. The more you know about the form American Vandal is skewering, the funnier it is and the smarter it feels. In the moment, it’s a Netflix miniseries that responds to other Netflix miniseries. In isolation, it’s still really darn good.
Vandal is a fictional mockumentary crime series in the style of one of those wrongful-conviction shows like Making A Murderer, except it takes place at a high school and the crime is that someone spray-painted a penis on every car in the faculty lot. It’s a stupid, funny premise that the show takes to just the right amount of length, though the girth—uh, breadth, I should say—ends up being wider than you expect. What starts as a dick joke evolves into a rather compelling whodunnit, which evolves further into a clever, honest look at high school social politics.
Watching American Vandal has the gleeful, adrenal vibe of getting away with something. It’s not exactly a laugh-out-loud comedy, though there are some hilarious moments, but it is a comedy that keeps a wicked grin stuck to your face. It’s a loveable troublemaker that makes you feel complicit to its crassness and in partnership with its mischief. There’s no reason this show should work, or even really exist in the first place, but it does. Every weird side plot and wonky documentary takedown is smart, thoughtful, and full. It doesn’t do anything halfway, and that lack of swugness makes Vandal all-the-way worthwhile.
The show deserves extra credit on two fronts. One, it takes its phallic mystery and services it (…) with a surprisingly deep (…) and twisty (???) storyline. American Vandal has an advantage over other true crime shows because it can script itself a satisfying narrative, and it’s a pleasant surprise to realize it does exactly that. There’s a lineup of compelling and suspicious suspects, and the mechanics of the “filmmaker’s” investigation are methodical, thorough, and tense. Things go in places you don’t expect, and there are some genuine revelations to be had. As much as it will make you cackle, it’ll also make you throw up a couple eyebrows, not to mention mull over a couple theories. What you think to be an uninvolved watch, something you can have on in the background while you take care of the chores, actually proves to be an engaging, engrossing viewing experience.
And that’s bolstered by Vandal’s other great achievement: Its reflection of modern high-school life. The mockumentary’s integration of Snapchat, IG, Facebook, and even Twitch is some of the smartest TV presentation this year. Prior events are reconstructed through social media videos and pictures, accusations and reputations are confirmed or denied via profile stalking, and the landscape of digital teenage communication becomes vital to the main story. It betrays an intelligence that the in-depth penis analysis and hookup-rumor verification models almost manage to mask. If there was a mystery to be solved at a high school in 2017, the tools of investigation and solution would look a lot like they do in American Vandal.
The fact that the show fills out this scaffolding with such a delightful cast of characters is even more of a treat. There are the classic high-school stereotypes here: the hot chick, the brown-noser, the foreign-exchange hero, the douchey jock, and the class president, but the archetypes work because they feel true in their relationships to one another. All of these kids are insecure about something, and Vandal communicates their angst by dialing in on how they navigate their place within the social hierarchy of Hanover High. Some kids front, others start rumors, others tease, others clap back. This might not have the overt stakes of a 13 Reasons Why or Riverdale, but the kids of American Vandal feel more real than anyone on either of those shows. From writing to casting to acting, it’s an accomplishment. They’re all funny, too.
And that’s also where the American Vandal snake begins to eat its own tail. The humor here isn’t as much in snarky lines or outrageous scenarios. It’s more that this specific scenario is being treated with the same seriousness and intensity that something like Making A Murderer would. The joke isn’t the penis art; the joke is Netflix. There’s a strange meta angle to this where we’re watching a show on Netflix that skewers the exact kind of miniseries Netflix tends to promote. American Vandal thus becomes one of our best examples of a responsive piece of entertainment. This is a great show, but it exists only because of certain other shows, and without those shows, the product here is undeniably less substantial and effective. This was made to fit within a larger context, even if it succeeds on its own merit.
It can’t be known if American Vandal will convince Netflix to keep delving into self-parodic shows (it’s reasonable that this would be affected by viewership, too), but it is notable that the streaming service has opened the door. As we the audience grow savvier to what kinds of shows appear on Netflix, and what presentation patterns those shows fall into, Netflix itself could begin to feed that awareness with further satires of itself. That’s a risky prospect.
If you want to make fun of yourself, you better be accurate, or you only come off like a misguided loser. Netflix is cool right now, and so it’s fortunate that its self-deprecation in American Vandal proved to be so on-point. If it keeps taking this satirical tack, and fails, it will come off as tone-deaf, and Netflix’s coolness, built on a “we know what you want and we’ll give it to you” model, will fade. People who try too hard to be popular never stay popular. That’s not a highbrow concept; that’s High School 101.