The television streamer Netflix released one of the least favorably reviewed shows in its history early this week with its political thriller/comedy/horror miniseries, “SignalGate,” which Variety immediately called “Preposterous on every level.”
I’ve included an excerpt from Variety reviewer Cornel Zoetrope’s review here, with permission from a large group of imaginary friends from that august trade journal that covers everything Hollywood:
The premise behind this star-studded and ambitious series starring Jeremy Strong as an imaginary companion to a president with perpetually orange skin is ludicrous. It’s one thing to throw some humor into a political thriller, but the wild scenarios thrown at the viewer are as if a monkey is sitting in a director’s chair, throwing mounds of excrement at the audience, and hoping something sticks.
The first episode alone is a hornet’s nest of implausible plot lines. It opens with a ketamine-fueled filthy rich tech bro given security clearances and firing thousands of federal employees through strangely worded tweets and emails.
In what the showrunners presumably think is a dash of comedy, the tech bro seizes the government’s human resources email system and sends out a demand that all personnel send weekly lists of five accomplishments for that week.
If this reminds you of the absurdist science fiction story Thirty Minutes by the brilliant writer Charles Bastille, you’re not alone, but it makes no sense in this context.
Even worse, we’re supposed to believe that a somewhat crazed private citizen can run around federal offices firing employees.
There’s nothing wrong with Mark Rylance’s near-repeat performance of the tech bro from Netflix’s successful streamer “Don’t Look Up,” but the believability factor nears zero in this rendition.
Jeremy Strong, as usual, is fantastic as an imaginary companion (think Jimmy Stewart’s Harvey) to a bumbling, illiterate president who insists on shading himself orange every morning while directing his military and intelligence teams to deal with tribal warriors in the sand dunes of a remote outpost. But from the outset, we’re not sure if we are watching a comedy, science fiction, or horror show.
The defense secretary, superbly played by Jim Carrey, is a perpetually drunk former Fox News celebrity who insists on managing military manoeuvers through the Signal messaging app, and occasionally, Snapchat.
Although there is one hilarious moment where Carrey’s slapstick version of a defense secretary invites a journalist into a supposedly highly classified chat by sending a dick pic, it’s not worth the price of watching the rest of this incoherent madness.
One scene involving a large team of intelligence and military personnel yukking it up and mocking the American people while Carrey’s character laughs, “They’d never believe we’re actually doing this,” isn’t funny, it’s just a glaringly stupid knockoff of “Dumb and Dumber.”
The first episode opens when the U. S. National Security Advisor, a dense former Congressman ably played by Nick Offerman, identifies a threat on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula popoulated by characters that so closely resemble Dune’s Fremen that viewers will want to jump on a spice-laden ship and warp speed away from this embarrassment as fast as Einstein can carry them.
While the first episode focuses on the preposterous notion that the military would issue commands and updates on a publicly available and easily hacked open source system like Signal, subsequent episodes attempt to show a darker side, with an authoritative regime that snatches journalists and writers in the early hours and detains them in a Lousisiana prison that, by the third episode, has morphed into a concentration camp.
The series clearly can’t decide if it’s a comedy or a horror show. The only consistently entertaining thread throughout the series is Jeremy Strong as the president’s imaginary friend, who tries to guide a hapless president who speaks in largely unintelligible monosyllables as he fumes about foes, known and unknown.
Meanwhile, an army of tech bros manipulates the president like a mannequin as his mind, already feeble and warped in the first episode, deteriorates into madness in a way that throws this confusing mess of a series in another direction: Is it also a psychological thriller?
Many scenes close with Strong’s character shaking the shoulders of a slumbering president in the wee hours, convincing him to send bizarre, all-caps tweets that defy anything close to something a man elected president in the 21st century would do in real life.
Hence, the core problem with this jumbled series, which is a switchback of impossible and absurd conflicts. At one moment, we watch dark scenes of terror as Ron Perlman, playing a thirsty ICE officer whose bald head is littered with white nationalist tattoos, rounds up terrified legal immigrants in the middle of the night. The next moment, we’re treated to hilarious moments between the president and his imaginary friend.
As much as I enjoyed Carrey’s and Strong’s performances, this mass of confusion and foolishness left me wanting something more than a combination of “Weekend at Bernie’s Goes to Washington” and a Marx Brothers version of “Harvey.”
Notes
I had fun making this graphic and originally turned it into a Note. I decided it deserved its own post.
It’s fair to say that none of what is going on is funny, but humor helps me cope.
The image of the Fremen dude is cropped from an original image by Astronimation, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“The defense secretary, superbly played by Jim Carrey”
This needs to happen.