Summary: The true-crime satire series from Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault follows Peter Maldanaldo (Tyler Alvarez) as he investigates the expulsion of high school senior Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro) for allegedly spray painting faculty cars with phallic images.Source http://www.metacritic.com/tv/american-vandal
Light Spoilers
A lot of people recently have been complaining about how many original shows there are on Netflix now. Hbo only releases between 15-20 a year so it’s easy to spot the quality and see whats good and whats not. Netflix on the other hand for example is releasing over 600+ hours of original programs this year… so a lot of gold can kinda slip by you. This has actually been my favorite part of the new Netflix strategy. Stumbling upon a new show that people aren’t talking about yet makes it feel like you discovered the show. “Ozark” came out of fucking nowhere and rocked my nut’s off. Suggesting a dope ass tv show to someone that has nothing to watch basicly makes you a god.
So What is American Vandal…? On the surface it looks like it’s a 4 hour dick joke…Which it is, but once you get settled into the actual mystery of who dun it, it becomes much more. So in a nutshell American Vandal is a mockumentery that nails the same look and feel as “Making A Murderer” but in a high school setting. Dylan Maxwell of Hanover High has been charged with painting dicks on 27 cars in the faculty parking lot. Dylan is your typical burnout, dipshit teenager that denies these allegations even though he has a track record for drawing dicks on the whiteboard in class.
Dead bent on finding out the truth, fellow classmate Peter Maldonado films a documentary in hopes of exonerating Dylan of his charges. Peter realizes pretty quickly that Dylan is one of the dumbest kids in school (Similar to a Brendan Dassey) and not capable of pulling off a crime of this magnitude, even though Dylan was in the A/V club. Eye Witness Alex Trimboli say’s he saw Dylan paint the dicks….but his testimony was found to be unreliable because he claims to have recieved a hand job from the hottest girl in school.
The detail that went into finding out if brace faced Alex Trimboli actually did get a hand job from Sara Pearson Makes you forget that you’re watching a spoof. You get to the point where similar to “Making A Murderer” you start building the case in you’re own head and start asking your own questions. It’s not the over the top “Scary Movie” type of spoof but it almost becomes a comedy / mystery in a documentary’s uniform. Once i got about halfway through i thought that it was a wrap..i knew who did it…then another clue comes into play that totally changes your theories….and when it does..you can’t help but laugh your ass off.
I would do some quotables here but Dylan’s trailer park boy style dialog is better in the moment. The suporting cast here does a great job as well, especially the brutally honest for his own good history teacher “Mr Kraz” who friends his students on Facebook to get involved in the classroom drama and talk about how impossibly hot some of his students are. Dylan’s crew “The Wayback Boyz” also provides some hilarious moments. The idea of “baby farts”… Running up to a baby in the street and farting in their faces had me belly laughing like a 13 yeard old.
So congratulations to netflix for making fun of itself and creating something uniqe at the same time. “American Vandal” is now streaming on Netflix.
-Tonzo-