Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Round Of Applause’ On Netflix, A Strange Dramedy About A Couple And Their Nihilist Kid Through The Decades

How much absurdism do you want in your television viewing? We do appreciate absurdism when we see it, but, like most people, we want to be at least partially in on the conceit of that absurdism. A new dramedy from Turkey uses a lot of absurdism in its first episode, but not really in a good way.

A ROUND OF APPLAUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Zeynep (Aslihan Gürbüz) is meditating in her living room. Her husband Mehmet (Fatih Artman) watches her. He interrupts her and she yells at him about watching her meditate; it doesn’t sound like the first time this has happened.

The Gist: Mehmet interrupts Zeynep to tell her that the woman from the stroller store called to tell them the model they wanted was in stock. Then we see the couple in a whirlwind of baby planning. As Zeynep sits in peace in the nursery they set up, Zeynep suddenly realizes that she and her husband forgot to have sex in order to create that baby.

We flash to a very pregnant Zeynep; she and Mehmet have friends over who act spoiled and overprivileged. In fact, when their takeout dinner is delivered and a particular pasta dish isn’t in the bag, one of the friends almost loses it. As Zeynep and Mehmet sleep that night, the other couple come in, scared about the thunderstorm. The couple increasingly acts like children, calling them Mom and Dad, until Mehmet wakes up and laments that their child is going to be just as spoiled as their friends are, which gets Zeynep upset.

The couple go to stand on line on Election Day, and Zeynep ends up sitting on a bench next to another pregnant woman. Zeynep has been imagining her fetus (Cihat Suvarioglu) as a smoking, bearded man sitting in a cluttered room, but now he has company from the fetus “next door.” Zeynep’s fetus laments his presence and the life he’s about to lead, getting wistful for the days where he was a protein inside the flesh of an orange (which turns out to not be a metaphor… he really means an orange). He also laments how his mother bottles everything up, likening his cluttered womb to “a burglar’s house.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Round Of Applause is like the movie Boyhood, only a hell of a lot stranger.

Our Take: While watching the first episode of A Round Of Applause, we were trying to figure out whether the show was daring, weird, or both. There were moments during that episode where we didn’t quite grasp what was going on. Why are Zeynep and Mehmet’s friends acting like children and calling them Mom and Dad? Who is this other fetus that Zeynep’s fetus is talking to? And why the hell does Zeynep’s fetus a 35-year-old man that smokes?

That’s likely how the show’s creator, Berkun Oya, wants us to feel. There’s a disorienting aspect to A Round Of Applause that is likely supposed to match the disorientation people feel at various periods of their parenting lives. Given that we’re going to see this family, including their son Metin, at various stages of their lives, we’re pretty sure that disorientation is going to continue.

But we’ve had more than enough shows about how adults deal with parenthood that it feels like the quirkiness isn’t all that necessary. Sure, we’re going to likely see a lot of Metin’s perspective in this series, which isn’t always what we see during other shows about the whirlwind of parenting.

That may be the wildcard that sets A Round Of Applause apart. But we not only felt disoriented at more than one point during the first episode, we also felt like Oya was leaving us behind, storywise; in other words, he’s playing 3D chess and we’re playing with paper checkers. Making your viewers feel stupid is no way to keep them watching a show, and we certainly felt stupid at various times during the first episode.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Zeynep’s nihilistic fetus starts climbing up his umbilical cord as his mother and father leave the voting center after Zeynep’s water breaks.

Sleeper Star: Whoever conceived of what Zeynep’s womb looked like did a good job of representing her crowded mind, as well as the buckets of water pouring on the fetus to signify her crying on the inside.

Most Pilot-y Line: The fetus next to Zeynep’s fetus claims his name is Kudret. “No matter what silly name they have in mind for me, I’ll always know that my name is Kurdret.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. We get what the writer of A Round Of Applause was going for with some of the more absurd aspects of its first episode, but they didn’t really land and, frankly, made us feel like we just weren’t getting it. And that’s never a feeling we like to have when we’re watching a show.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.