This post contains significant plot details about the first two seasons of Review. Knowing this stuff won't ruin the actual viewing experience, but if you're already planning to watch Review after the first couple paragraphs, stop there so as to maintain the surprises the show has in store.
"Life. It's literally all we have. But is it any good?"
I'm going to describe a TV show for you. A devoted family man chooses an unorthodox career path. Though his intentions could be considered somewhat noble, the actions he takes to further this career bring nothing but harm and destruction to himself and to everyone around him. Before long a body count starts building up and everything he does has an impending sense of doom. Yet, despite having every chance to change or get out, the man refuses to abandon course because he believes that what he's doing is too important to stop. Even as he stands to lose everything he keeps going, always apparently hitting rock bottom only to learn he still has a long ways down to go.
Sound familiar? You can find at least a part of the basic premise I described above in the majority of anti-hero dramas that have been so popular in the past few years. Without any of the details filled in, I could easily be talking about Breaking Bad. The key difference between the show I'm describing and all those anti-hero shows though? This one is also one of the funniest shows you'll ever watch, even as the feeling of dread kicks in. It's called Review and it's both familiar and unlike anything you've ever watched, a darkly hysterical look at human nature, the systems we trap ourselves in, and the subjective nature of criticism.
Created and adapted from an Australian TV Show by Andy Daly, Jeffrey Blitz, and Charlie Siskel, Review (Which starts it's abbreviated 3rd and final season in the U.S. tonight before premiering in Canada next week on MUCH) stars Daly as self-proclaimed "life reviewer" Forrest MacNeil. Forrest hosts "Review", a show-within-a-show where he reviews life experiences chosen from an apparently random system of viewer requests on a scale of 0.5 to 5 stars. The reviews range from small things like being racist, having a best friend, being the life of the party, and public speaking to more significant things like divorce, being buried alive, being a little person and going to space. No matter the size of the task though, the reviews almost always backfire on Forrest, wrecking havoc on his life and bringing pain on him and/or the people around him in all kinds of unexpected ways, which is where the fun and dread come into play. From having to attend a custody hearing in a Batman costume to getting lost at sea for three months to seeing an imaginary friend brutally shanked in prison, you can never predict how a review will go wrong for Forrest, only that it will go wrong and it will always be funny. Even something has harmless sounding as an afternoon alone in a rowboat could get Forrest stranded at sea for over three months.
The genius of Review comes from the decision to make it so the reviews themself don't exist in a continuity-free vacuum. This isn't some cartoony setting where everything that's torn down is built up again by the next episode. The stuff Forrest does for the show has actual consequences on his life that carry over and build up over the course of the show bringing a weight and a darkness to the show as Forrest's life gets worse and worse. When Forrest divorces his wife Suzanne (A terrific Jessica St. Clair) three episodes in, she doesn't forgive him and take him back after the review is over, instead he spends much of the show pining for her and hoping to win her back as she just grows more and more disappointed in him and the insanity he invites into his life. When Forrest attends that custody hearing in a Batman costume, Suzanne's lawyer has a whole list of reasons why Forrest is an unfit parent based solely on things Forrest has done for the show. When Forrest's actions end up somehow leading to the destruction of both of his father's (Max Gail) homes (Over two different episodes), he has to live out of his office for the rest of the season. When Forrest eventually murders someone for the show, he spends an episode in prison before getting released on bail (The upcoming 3rd season is apparently going to deal with his trial). Slowly but surely Forrest loses or alienates everyone that he cares about, is plunged into debt, and almost dies a dozen different times. The result is a show that's hard to watch but impossible to look away from, with a darkness that doesn't stop growing but never takes over completely. This is a comedy after all.
A lot of why the darkness of Review never becomes too much to take comes from Daly's performance as Forrest, a person who's as charmingly innocent and full of child-like wonder about what he does as he is selfish and woefully shortsighted. Over the course of the series Forrest does some horrible, horrible, horrible things for the show but he never becomes totally unlikeable thanks to Daly who makes Forest blissfully unaware that things are about to go terribly wrong until the second before it happens. That ignorance keeps the audience on Forrest's side and keeps them rooting for him to somehow break the cycle he insists on trapping himself in, even as he fails to do so time and time again. At the same time when Forrest does ruin his life or almost gets himself killed, you don't feel too badly because the show knows there's something incredibly arrogant about a middle-age white man insisting that he's somehow able to objectively rate life experiences and the show isn't afraid to show what a fool Forrest is. It's a tricky balance to manage but Daly pulls it off with aplomb, making Forrest into a much more complex character than he might be in lesser hands.
Ultimately what makes Review great is the same thing that makes all the best anti-hero shows great: a refusal let the protagonist off the hook for their horrible actions and a willingness to play with audience expectations and push them out of their comfort zone. Early on the show introduces Grant (James Urbaniak), Forrest's oily producer who manipulates Forrest every time Forrest has doubts about a review into going through with it and who has no apparent moral compass. Urbaniak plays the character with such expert sliminess that it becomes easy to buy into the idea that Forrest is some poor innocent sap being manipulated for the sake of ratings and prop up Grant as the show's villain. As the show goes on though, it becomes obvious that Grant's manipulation isn't to blame for Forrest's problems, Forrest is. Forrest is the one who created the show and chooses to follow absurdly narrow guidelines for how to go about interpreting and completing his assignments. Forrest is the one who ignores the concerns of his co-host A.J. (Megan Stevenson, the show's secret comic weapon), his father and everyone else because he thinks his work is important. Forrest is the one blind to the fact that objectively reviewing life experiences is impossible and his pain is not universal. Forrest is the one who refuses to say no time and time again in order to uphold the principles of the show and prioritizes those principles over everything else in his life. After his review of using a Magic 8 Ball to make all his decisions goes poorly, Forrest lambastes the idea of using an arbitrary system to make choices instead of following your gut instinct, but his entire life is beholden to the arbitrary system of Review, a system he can't back down from because doing so would expose how meaningless everything he does really is (A simple request to rate something six stars out of five is enough to trigger a near-existential crisis).
Review, like any anti-hero show isn't for everyone and even those with very high tolerance for cringe comedy will be sorely tested. Watching a man destroy his life over and over and over for no reason isn't always the most pleasant viewing experience and it's hard to describe why the show is so appealing. In the end, it probably comes down to how oddly joyful and fun the show is. Don't get me wrong, it's a very dark show and the situations get quite bleak, but it never feels like a bleak show, even when the show gets around to it's Murder review. The show takes great glee in the ridiculousness of what Forrest is doing and it never forgets an opportunity to add in some silliness to all the pain. From the complete ineffectualness of Forrest's unpaid College intern Josh (Michael Croner) and Josh's girlfriend Tina (Hayley Huntley) to Forrest's complete ignorance of how the internet works to the brilliant asides and reaction shots of A.J., there's always something to laugh at in this show. Even when Forrest is broken to his very core, you're excited to see what will happen next because the show doesn't forget how to have fun. So yes, Review's devotion to the anti-hero drama formula is what makes it interesting but the joy it brings to all of it's misery is what makes it special and what will keep it in the conversation of all-time great comedies for a very long time. Five stars.
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