My Brother, My Brother, and Me: Season 1

Here's one that only really came to my attention once my friends' year-end rankings started pouring in. At six episodes, half an hour each, it's another really, really easy show to watch. It comes from a long-running podcast, in which three manboys - truly "large adult sons" in every sense of the word - answer listener questions and give (presumably comically bad) advice. The show is set in their West Virginia hometown of Huntington, and guys, I dunno, but to me this whole thing just oozes with every bad "suburban white people" trope you can find. These guys are funny, no doubt, and talented at improvising and goofing with each other and performing various bits and gimmicks. But they're maybe the three biggest failson goobers who've ever had their own TV show. Most episodes involve them dropping in on the mayor's office, and filming his reactions to their outlandish ideas and requests, and since the mayor knows their family really well and since the boys are arguably the biggest three celebrities in the town, the mayor suffers it all with a smile, as do the police chief and the high school principal and teachers.

I'm being too hard on this. It's funny! And its heart is in the right place. But it is really truly nothing more than three chucklehead grown men, between the ages of 29 and 35, doing shenanigans around their town. And like, not even without breaking into giggling fits half of the time. It's like, in one corner you have Nathan Fielder, enduring the most cringe-inducing and awkward conversations with total strangers without ever so much as cracking a smile... and then on the complete other end of the spectrum are these three, the McElroy "boys," whose show includes, like, entire minutes-long segments of them trying to call Ellen DeGeneres to invite her to be on their show, only they can't even get past "Hi, I'm looking for-" without breaking into gigglefits.

Weirdly enough, it's still a very well made and immaculately crafted show. They're going for a very specific sort of laid back tone here, where the world is already perfect and utopian, where America's biggest problems are dorm roommate disputes and married couples being unable to agree on whether or not to get a tarantula. It's just absolutely a show that exists in a bubble - an upper middle class, white, suburban American bubble. And there's nothing wrong with that! Literally hundreds of television shows exist these days, and to say that none of them can or even should be about vanilla-bland hometowns full of almost exclusively white people paying no mind to anything of even a thematic or symbolic importance is, you know, ridiculous. There's just a ceiling here, is all, when you make a TV show about nothing more than being silly in the absolute comfort zone of your hometown in which you are friends with the mayor. Oh well! I'll still probably be back for a second season if they are.