5 out of 5

Created by: Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda

covers season 1

Credit: In his IGN review of the series, Matt Fowler states the he hoped his review cast more attention on what he felt was a deserving show, and, the main selling point he highlighted which did the trick for grabbing my interest was his acknowledgment that the show’s tags as a Funny or Die project, and as a mockumentary, misled assumptions about its tone, when in actuality American Vandals genius is in how seriously it takes its topic.  Not deadpan serious; not feigned ignorance, Christopher Guest serious; but a sincere, straight-forward take.  This by no means makes it bereft of humor, but the comedy comes organically – not taking the easiest route to its humor – and the commitment to its tone results in the biggest surprise: an actual emotional payoff, and one without an easy white or black interpretation.  Fowler emphasized all of this and I whole-heartedly agree, and only hope to underline the praise.

AV is, indeed, presented like a documentary – even the opening credits don’t betray otherwise – but it is fiction, hence the accurate (if unfortunate) mockumentary tag.  And the focus of the doc would seem to lend itself to a particularly lowbrow sense of humor (which ends up being an important concept for the show’s eventual conceit): Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro), Hanover High senior, is pending expulsion after being accused of vandalizing 27 teacher’s cars.  Or, I’m sorry, in the show’s parlance, spray painting 27 dicks on those cars.  Did you titter at that?  Sure, me too.  And that’s one of AV’s first sleights: our series is filmed / presented by fellow student Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez), and the whole thing is told from his age-appropriate perspective.  So to him, they’re dicks.  Shoulder shrug.  To him, to his filmed subjects, hand jobs, four-letter words, casual sex, hash tags, and etcetera are all part of the daily conversation.  When the kids are around adults, they stumble around their words; when they’re around each other, the language flows freely.  So instead of actually chortling at the naughty language, were laughing at how commonplace it becomes – in a sense, how innocent it seems – which draws into question all sorts of fun things about perception.

Peter posits that the accused – who’s a known delinquent (portrayed with perfect Butthead farts-are-funny doofness by Tatro) and who happens to have a habit of drawing genitalia on class whiteboards – is actually innocent; that the evidence is circumstantial, and he’s being convicted, basically, on assumption.  Peter leverages friends from his school news crew to launch and film an investigation, the step-by-steps of which form our documentary.

Some comparisons come to mind.  Take the genre-warped-through high school antics of Brick, replacing noir with Serial-like reveals; take the hilariously detailed handjob conversation from Silicon Valley and transport its enthusiasm toward, and serious treatment of, minutiae to a low-stakes offense; and take the tonal rug-pull of Catfish, except pretend like that was a good movie, and that the rug-pull doesn’t betray any of what came before.

While AV’s self awareness is sometimes too on the nose (mentioning Serial momentarily broke the immersion) and, even at eight episodes, the red herrings start to drag things out quite a bit, I was completely sold on the experience by how well it follows through on everything.  Peter and his crew don’t escape the experience without scrutiny, and, to say the least, the “judging a book by its cover” problem with which the series opens – and which is used to humorously dig deep into this crime – ends up blanketing the entire experience, both internally – all of the principles – and externally, as viewers.   It’s a pretty stunning sense of completion.

There’s no way this works without the cast and direction.  I called out Tatro, but Alvarez, Dylan’s girlfriend, the teachers – all nail these roles, perfectly believable in sliding between professionalism, gossip, and age-appropriate actions.  The camera follows a similar realism: Av feels like a show producer by teens who have seen these very shows.  It’s not amateurish, but there’s almost an unaware lack of manipulation to it that prevents it from tipping in to satire.

All of this is for the same intention as that IGN review: I’m hopefully paying my opinion forward.  This is smart entertainment.  We need more like it.