Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The promos for the third and final season of Comedy Central’s relentlessly brilliant series Review clearly state that the show’s intrepid host, Forrest MacNeil, may straight-up die before it’s all said and done. How did a simple series about a critic who reviews real-life experiences evolve into the darkest comedy on television? Two words: Andy Daly.
As any fan of Scott Aukerman’s long-running podcast Comedy Bang Bang will tell you, Andy Daly is the comedic gift that just keeps on giving. To say the actor has an affinity for portraying abnormal characters would be like saying that the Grand Canyon is a “pretty neat hole.” His arsenal of bizarre personas include a cowboy poet who enjoys having sex with the earth, a man lobbying for the position of Honorary Mayor of Hollywood (who’s also the incarnation of Satan on Earth), and an avowed Sha Na Na enthusiast named Hot Dog. These characters are, to use a scientific term, bananas. In anyone else’s hands these eccentrics would be alienating weirdos, but Daly has the uncanny ability to turn dark and absurd into relatable and endearing.
His time spent creating a merry band of misfits on Comedy Bang Bang has led to Daly’s comedic crescendo: Forrest MacNeil.
Adapted from the Australian television series Review with Myles Barlow, Daly’s Comedy Central mockumentary has a simple premise: Forrest MacNeil hosts a TV show where viewers send in various life experiences for Forrest to review. From benign requests like “What’s it like to spend time on a rowboat?” to more unusual requests like “What’s it like to lead a cult?,” Daly is unrelenting in his quest to accurately review each entreaty as he displays unflinching devotion to his craft. From Forrest’s increasingly distorted point of view, there’s no profession more noble than being a life reviewer. It’s not so much a job as it is a calling.
Every review is essential; no review is trivial; and no request, including murder, is off the table.
“Moments after a viewer asked me to kill someone, I was summoned to a meeting with my producer Grant and Review’s legal council,” Forrest intones with the inflection typically reserved for conversations about new carpeting or lunch coupons.
What’s preposterous to us is ordinary to Forrest. It doesn’t take much coaxing from Grant — portrayed with a quiet, Machiavellian zeal by James Urbaniak — to convince Forrest to murder someone for the show, which makes complete sense. The show is all that Forrest has left. It cost him his marriage. His family. He’s been buried alive, lost at sea, shot, stabbed, lost in the wilderness, sent to jail, and countless other maladies of both the physical and mental variety.
Being a reviewer of real-life experiences is the sum total of his existence. It’s all that he has left. Without it, he doesn’t exist. The morbid nature of the series has led some to speculate that the show is actually set in purgatory; a theory Daly didn’t entirely dismiss during a recent interview with Vulture.
“Well, we talked about it a lot. Here’s what I think I can say: More than the notion of purgatory, we started to talk about the story of Job. The Forrest story is a Job story, and we talked to varied degrees about turning up the volume on that for season three.”
No matter how the series concludes, it’s become apparent that Forrest is too far gone to find salvation. In the Season 3 premiere, MacNeil was tasked the aspirational assignment of discovering what it’s like to have your dream come true. Instead of using this review to welcome a snippet of joy into his own life, Forrest took the assignment literally, reenacting an actual dream that resulted in him standing naked on his ex-wife’s doorstep.
There are dark comedies and then there’s Review. Thanks to Andy Daly, watching a person’s slow decent into unadulterated madness has never been this much fun. Comedy may very well be “tragedy plus time,” but you don’t need to look into a crystal ball to know that the most innovative, literal-laugh-loud sitcom on television is Review.
