Our Highest Rec: Oh, Hello! Is For Anyone, Not Everyone

Oh, Hello! is a fake stage play put on by two fake geriatrics played by two real comedians, and that’s really the simplest way to explain it. The show had a brief tour on Broadway before it was taped and put on Netflix a few months ago. When you watch it, you’re more or less watching a pre-recorded rendition of the play, except there are also some introductory bits from the two old guys, even though those parts are more sketches than anything, because again, the old guys are just characters portrayed by two comedians. I suppose that’s the tougher way to explain it.

Oh, Hello! is “about” two senior New Yorkers trying to make their way in the city they grew up in, but on a more shallow level it’s really about their friendship, and on a deeper level it’s really about the hackiness and clichés of theater in general. It’s funny—really, really funny—but it’s also bizarre and weird and is the kind of thing that is hard to recommend to anyone else, because when you’re watching it you have the sense that only a very certain type of person would like it.

The perfect audience member for Oh, Hello! is probably a late-twenties theater geek who moved to New York after college. There are a ton of New York jokes and a ton of inside-baseball theater jokes, the narrower of which namedrop specific regional actors, and the broader of which skewer the myriad tropes of dramatic stage acting, like telephone calls designed to give unnatural exposition, and monologues designed to underscore themes and lend faux-profundity. You’ll laugh at this show if you’re savvy with theater and have seen a few plays, you’ll laugh harder if you did theater yourself, and you’ll laugh hardest if you did theater and then moved to New York to try and keep the dream alive.

That’s to say, the Oh, Hello! house of jokes has a low threshold—anyone can enter—but a bunch of childgates—not everyone is going to be able to access certain rooms. It’s a completely niche piece of work that only lives for certain people. This isn’t meant to be a crowd-pleasing performance or even an audience-serving work for John Mulaney and Nick Kroll fans (they wrote the show and play the geriatric leads). In fact, you have the sense watching it that it’s really just for John Mulaney and Nick Kroll themselves. A couple times, the pair crack each other up and force one another to break character. There’s a vibe of “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this.”

It’s not an accident, then, that Oh, Hello! is on Netflix. In fact, it seems like Netflix is the only thing Oh, Hello! could possibly exist on. It’s too weird to appear on HBO (think about that for a second) and it’s not broad enough for Comedy Central. A show like this, without a clear target audience and without a care toward ratings or numbers, belongs on something that will appreciate its creativity and then just let it be. That’s the Netflix way: minimum meddling, easy money, no mention of viewership numbers after the fact.

That’s a symptom of this era of television, too, if you even want to call Oh, Hello! a piece of television. We’re at such a saturation point in terms of quantity that the concept of a show having a target audience is more narrow and refined than ever. Target audiences can’t be “men and women ages 28-45” anymore. They have to be “Spielberg fans” (Stranger Things) or “hyper-woke, intellectual millennials” (Handmaid’s Tale) or “people who wished Breaking Bad was like 40-percent worse” (Ozarks). The strength of a pitch to streaming services like Netflix or Hulu is no longer in something’s potential to reach viewers, but rather on the trustworthiness of the creators and the completeness of their vision. Louis CK can do whatever he wants on Louie because he’s Louis CK and he writes that show in a really smart and considerate way. Same with Donald Glover and Atlanta and Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s why Benioff & Weiss were greenlit to produce Confederate, too. Studio executives don’t ask who a story is for anymore; they just ask for something complete. In a few ways, that’s encouraging and exciting. In other ways, it’s worrisome.

If studios or streaming companies don’t care who’s watching their products, then audiences will only fracture further. Fracturing doesn’t affect Netflix’s bottom line—all those people are still arriving at their favorite shows via the same means—but it affects the viewing experience of the consumer for sure. Oh, Hello! is destined to be something you enjoy by yourself. It’s not something you queue up with your roommates on a late weeknight or show your parents when you’re home over the holidays. That’s not to its discredit, but that does limit its reach, and that’s a weird dynamic for something this thoughtful and smart and hilarious.

Then again, that’s perhaps the best part of Oh, Hello!—it has no interest in breaking out. For all its wrinkled, hunched protagonists talk about their big dreams and their glory days, this show doesn’t really have any of those same aspirations. It’s at ease, and it’s that exact contentedness that lets it be so unique and experimental and unexpected. Comedy shouldn’t pander, and this show is rewarding, and was rewarded, because it doesn’t.