“I was desperate, I just pooped on the floor.”
American Vandal Season 2 opens on an extended scene of every student at St. Bernardine’s shitting their pants. Shot after shot of kids in uniforms lifting their skirts up, pulling their khaki pants down, throwing themselves into trash cans, sitting down next to lockers, banging on bathroom stall doors.
This season of American Vandal, released on Netflix on Sept. 14, follows in the footsteps of the first season as a mock crime thriller. Over the span of eight episodes, a mysterious school crime is laid to rest, and Peter and Sam, the teenage documentary makers, assist a falsely accused perpetrator in his quest for justice. And, as you probably guessed, this season’s crime is all about shit.
The Turd Burglar, introduced in the first episode, is an unidentified criminal with an active Instagram account who terrorizes the school with a series of poop-related crimes. There’s the Brownout, in which laxatives are put in the lemonade and the entire school shits their pants publicly, shown in excruciating detail over and over again; the dramatic moment that a Piñata is hit open and shit is flung across an English class; and the incident at a basketball pep rally when poop is shot out of T-shirt cannons onto the entire school. In the previous season, the crime involved dicks drawn on cars, which perpetuated the show’s uniquely charming theme of making a huge deal out of inconsequential things. With the severity of the poop crimes, season 2 loses that charm. Due to the number and scope of the Turd Burglar crimes, the first three episodes take it for granted that the average viewer finds videos of people shitting their pants hilarious. And, yes, I laughed out loud, but a show like American Vandal should be funnier than just a couple shock value laughs.
Shock value gets old, whereas the show excels in capturing the details of high school. American Vandal’s attentively crafted friendships and communities provide a lasting humor that makes this show the funniest and most original comedy since The Office. I was disappointed that the drama of this season didn’t pick up sooner. But thankfully after the poop was pushed to the side, the characters and the real story of social-media-fueled dispossession came to the forefront.
This season is set at a Washington State Catholic school, St. Bernadine’s, replacing the first season’s public school hooligans, overachievers, and potheads with a more individualized and polarized cast of characters: a rich lesbian with a fabricated Instagram persona, an uber-religious chubby boy who can’t handle sex-ed class, and a perpetually friend-zoned theater boy.
This season’s plot, though at times reaching into the absurd and the implausible, is driven by unique characters and complex interpersonal relationships. In this show, the actions of the community have consequences. Bullying, belittlement, public opinion, and friendships shape the main characters of the show as well as devastate them. By the end of the last episode, I was not laughing. I was left shaken and upset by the show’s depictions of the cruel realities of coming of age.
The main character of the show is Kevin McClain, who is suspected, from episode one, of being the Turd Burglar. He is described as a normal, popular boy until the fourth grade, when he shits his pants in gym class and is then dubbed “Shit Stain McClain,” making him a social outcast, presumably forever. Through the course of middle and high school, Kevin’s alienation intensifies. He starts his own terrible EDM band and becomes obsessed with fine teas. The show does an incredible job capturing the essence of his character: the nerdy, peculiar boy devoid of social awareness. He wears a pageboy hat and uses SAT vocabulary he doesn’t understand in an attempt to seem smarter. The show makes fun of him for his peculiarities while also making the audience sympathetic to him as a character that has been forced put up all his defenses. Kevin cautiously walks the line between pity and distaste, which is impressive as well as convincing.
The other protagonist is DeMarcus Tillman, a beloved black basketball star who comes from a different background than most other St. Bernardine students. He is the antidote for Kevin’s almost too upsetting isolation and weirdness. DeMarcus is funny, personable, confident, and genuinely nice. He also is portrayed as able to get away with anything by way of his star status. A good amount of screentime is devoted to him taking phone calls in class, yelling at kids in the hallway, and high-fiving nuns. Unlike Season 1, which was centered around a virtually all-white high school with white main characters, St. Bernadine’s student body is far more diverse.
Unfortunately, because DeMarcus’ athletic skill apparently cancels out his outsider status, the show erases any room for commentary on race and class. When Peter and Sam accuse DeMarcus of being the Turd Burglar, the school is so caught up in idolizing DeMarcus that they refuse to entertain this prospect, leading to Kevin commenting that ‘athletes’ always get away with things, whereas he can’t. The show pits DeMarcus against Kevin, making DeMarcus appear as the privileged one at the school. For a show with such an over analyzation of high school, American Vandal misses the opportunity to explore actual experiences of being black and low income at a white private high school.
Neither Kevin nor DeMarcus fit in for their own reasons. But that’s the key to high school, isn’t it? Does anyone truly “fit in”? Popular books, movies, and TV shows often focus on this turbulent period of life, making for widely relatable content for viewers of all ages across the country. Friendships formed in high school are complicated and intense because they exist in such an insulated environment, making it the perfect backdrop for the seemingly petty affairs in a show like American Vandal.
The show relies heavily on viewers’ abilities to relate to the minutiae of high school, but what makes American Vandal’s second season relevant in 2018 is not its relatability but its commentary and focus on social media. I know we’re past the stage of asking “is social media bad?” but high school can’t be portrayed simply in a social-media-less vacuum. In this season social media isn’t simply a tool used to solve a crime, but acts as a character on the show. The Turd Burglar is an online persona and a person. Instagram is a landscape where classmates deceive each other and are also angered by deception. Instagram has the power to ruin someone at St. Bernadine’s, which is a place where a character’s girlfriend breaks up with her because of a lie in a post. This may be overly dramatic, but the show’s exaggerations flesh it out as more than your typical high school drama.
A significant portion of the show is made out of close-ups of Instagram posts, Snapchat videos, pictures and videos posted to FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube. This is hard to play with and especially hard to make fun of in more than a “haha, that’s a funny photo,” way. It’s the reality of the age we live in, as cheesy as that sounds, and even in comedy, social media has to be taken seriously. The biggest crime that the Turd Burglar commits is tagging all the kids shitting their pants on Instagram, an extreme version of cyberbullying that calls into question the interaction between the digital world and real life.
American Vandal Season 2 is a show about poop, and how poop is funny. Which is pretty juvenile. But it’s also a show that’s self aware enough to surpass this surface level theme. It handles its subject matter with varying degrees of delicacy but succeeds in not taking itself too seriously. American Vandal fights the urge to sink into melodrama as its characters deal with the aftermath of bullying, secrets and messing up. Through the drama of a poop afflicted school, the show forces a community to interact. If you want constant laugh out loud humor about high school and characters that are genuinely funny, the first season of American Vandal will do the trick. But, although slow to build entertainingly, Season 2 crafts a landscape that weaves social media and real life into a cohesive world that successfully satisfies a craving for high school nostalgia while also commenting on the complexities of coming of age in the digital era.
American Vandal, Season 2 was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.