BrainDead: Season 1

Here's a blast from the not-distant past that I finally got around to seeing, a show that defies all logic and feels simultaneously dated and ahead of its time.

Journey back with me to the summer of 2016, a simpler time when Donald Trump was still absolutely just a punchline and the prevailing national mood toward the presidential race was an exasperated sigh. "What is wrong with everyone in Washington?" you may have asked, bewildered, with two hands in the air, as if you were Jerry Seinfeld.

What this show posits is that alien bugs have come to earth and crawled inside our politicians' brains. In particular, the aliens are forcing the far left and the far right to go even farther, even harder, the idea being that by dividing our nation the aliens can take over more readily without a united front mounting a challenge against them.

So it's a show that was ahead of its time in that it was the first one, to the best of my knowledge, to really capture the spirit of how fractured and divided we had become by 2016. Democrats and Republicans had shut down the government over budget bill disagreements as long ago as 2013, and I can absolutely see what this show was trying to go for in calling "both sides" of the aisle insane and incompetent.

But where it's hopelessly dated and almost offensively whitewashing reality by 2018 standards is in its characterization of the "far left" and the "far right." The show ignores class divide and racial politics altogether, characterizing the "far left" as an extreme caricature of, like, what moderates in 2004 thought liberals cared most about, like saving endangered species. This is especially weird since Bernie Sanders is repeatedly referenced on screen! And the extreme republicans are depicted as being mildly xenophobic form a place of earnest idiocy, rather than vehemently and openly racist.

What's weirdest about what BrainDead seems to try to be saying is that the show makes hay out of the corruption and shady dealings on both sides of the aisle, going so far as to have a Democratic senator straight up switch parties at one point, only to be countered by a Republican senator doing so immediately, but then its ultimate moral seems to be that extremism is bad and that centrists can save us from partisan gridlock - you know, from space aliens trying to break our government via ideological standoff.

All that said, perhaps I'm giving BrainDead too much credit for having a thought out message to spread at all; it's not like most Americans, particularly in 2016, would notice the cognitive dissonance lying at the intersection of "a healthy Senate rides the center of every issues and compromises constantly" and "our Senators are horribly corrupt people with no actual moral principles."

Anyway, enough about the politics of it all - let me sell you on the show!

Thirteen episodes. Stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead right before her mini-breakout in 2017 from Cloverfield Lane and Fargo, and she's great. So's the rest of the mostly no-name cast. The tone s what's delightfully weird here. It's not Patriot weird, but it comes damn close, especially considering that this thing aired on- oh yeah, have I not said this yet? - CBS of all places, America's grandparents' favorite network. I mean this show is truly bizarre, but in the right ways, not in the Adult Swim ways. "You Might Think," the 1984 hit single by The Cars, recurs so often that it becomes a catchy leitmotif for the alien invasion. Also, in a few cases of bug-brain-takeover gone bad, people's heads explode. Graphically, and all gory-like, right there on CBS. "Previously on" recaps come in the form of little acoustic songs from a fourth-wall-breaking narrator, and by one late season episode he's so overwhelmed and bummed out by everything that he just recaps a Gunsmoke episode instead.

In summation it's exactly the kind of show I find myself gravitating toward - something different, something new, something substantially weird. It never had any chance of a second season, and it knew as much, and wrapped up the first season in perfectly adequate series-ending fashion. It's absolutely not must-see TV, but I recommend it all the same to anyone looking for something delightfully quirky and weirdly 2016-specific in tone. Amazon Prime. You can do far worse!