Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine’ On Netflix, A Viral Comedy Star Puts On A Variety Special

A comedian who got popular on TikTok and Twitter this summer cashes in with her debut Netflix special, an all-star variety “hour” imagining her as the anchor of a morning show trying to keep it all together during these turbulent times. Will the comedy center hold?

SARAH COOPER: EVERYTHING’S FINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sarah Cooper enjoyed a lucrative career at Google until she realized she could spark more joy by making fun of corporate culture and her mostly male coworkers, and wrote multiple books. You might even call her the Dilbert of her generation. Please don’t. Regardless, Cooper became a celebrity this year thanks to our quarantine culture, when she began lip-synching Donald Trump with act-outs and uploading her videos to TikTok and Twitter. Millions of fans began spreading her videos. I even suggested Saturday Night Live hire her this summer to bring a fresh perspective to its lampooning of Trump. Alas, SNL didn’t come calling on Cooper. But Netflix did.
What Cooper came up with: A 49-minute variety special, with her at the center of it all as a morning TV news anchor, serving as a segue to interview segments, ad parodies and plenty of opportunities for Cooper to lip-synch as you have and haven’t seen her before. Among the comedians and celebrities along for the ride: Marcella Arguello, Fred Armisen, Jordan Black, Danielle Brooks, Connie Chung, Tommy Davidson, Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Hamm, Jane Lynch, Helen Mirren, Eddie Pepitone, Aubrey Plaza, Maya Rudolph,  Winona Ryder, Megan Thee Stallion, Ben Stiller, Marisa Tomei, and Jonathan Van Ness. A few of them appear as themselves, but most come in character.
Natasha Lyonne directed the special, with Rudolph, her longtime SNL writer pal Paula Pell, and Daniel Powell (Astronomy Club, I Think You Should Leave, Inside Amy Schumer) among the executive producers.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: What with two SNL alums in Rudolph and Armisen serving as her workplace colleagues, the coterie of celebrity cameos, topical sketches and ad parodies, it’s hard not to think of this as a one-off spin-off of SNL. Or perhaps, since Cooper’s special includes sketches imagining the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of her TV news network, a mix of SNL and 30 Rock?

Memorable Jokes: Armisen gets a recurring gag where, each time we see him, he’s working through a different, more elaborate mask and social-distancing get-up. Lynch plays a pastry chef named K.J. (spoiler alert: The K stands for Karen). Hamm plays a satirized version of the MyPillow guy. Stiller plays the personification of an AI CEO named 8008s (boobs, get it?) who invariably finds itself apologizing for misconduct. Plaza plays the host of a QAnon shopping channel. Ryder plays a fellow TV news anchor who was never the same since Election Night 2016.
Some of the other celebs show up as themselves, including Megan Thee Stallion on a wifi interview and Whoopi Goldberg in a voiceover spot.
But you really want to know if Cooper lip-synchs as Trump or not, don’t you? Of course she does. Not only does she turn in a performative interview beamed in from one of Trump’s golf courses, but also drops a bunch of non-sequiturs on Connie Chung, and in the special’s seminal sketch, re-enacts an even longer version of the Access Hollywood bus interview with Billy Bush (lip-synched by Dame Helen Mirren) and an unsuspecting soap opera star (re-enacted by Jonathan Van Ness).
Cooper also offers up lip-synch takes on Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka and Melania Trump.
Our Take: Making herself the beleaguered and bewildered anchor allows you to not only let you in how exasperating 2020 has been for her, too, despite her going viral in the good way, but also simply to let you know more about Cooper as more than just a pretty lip-synching face.
A bit in the control room of her fictional TV network finds Marv (Eddie Pepitone) and Lorraine (Marcella Arguello) telling Cooper how her audiences are responding to her, and the percentages don’t add up. Perhaps because most people still don’t know much about her, or perhaps had even heard her real voice before now. So she reminds us of her own immigrant experience, moving here as a young child from Jamaica, and implores upon us how “non-threatening” Black girls on TV influenced and inspired her to run where they had walked.
Plus she got to get into bed with Jon Hamm. Such are the perks of newfound fame.
For me, the more enjoyable aspects of the special came during the bits that had nothing to do with Trump but everything to do with how weird 2020 is, such as a sketch in which Cooper played a close-up card magician plying her tricks in a parking lot for a crowd stuck in their faraway cars.
Other sketches hit or missed as much due to the celebrity co-star’s willingness to throw him or herself into the character. So, much like SNL, then. Some of the satire feels cut from the same cloths as SNL, and as rushed to the screen as SNL. In that sense, too, the political parodies really preach to the choir, and coming this close to Election Day, it’s very of the moment. Which is good for today. Who knows how you’ll feel stumbling upon this in your Netflix queue in a few months, though.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You could wait and hope the best sketches get their own YouTube clips, but with only a week til Election Day, you might as well see them now before your friends share them with you first.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine on Netflix