Who Is America?: Season 1

I'm co-signing on a take from Todd VanDerWerff I heard earlier today: that Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America? is the most disappointing show of 2018 so far. Not the worst one, but one that had so much initial potential and instead found so little to say.

Step back for a second. What, if anything, do we have to gain by watching Baron Cohen pose as an effeminate NPR-loving coastal liberal with a gray ponytail and a pink pussy hat while telling a town hall full of blue-collar Arizona fifty-somethings that their town was about to become the site of a gigantic mega-mosque? I mean, what's the joke here? I'm laughing, and I'm cringing, I'll admit - but what's the takeaway? Working class white boomers in Arizona are xenophobic? Go figure.

Or how about when Baron Cohen plays an Israeli military hothead who meets with Dick Cheney and tells him he's a big fan of all the torture Cheney did, and calls Cheney out for shooting a guy in the face. "2007 called..." I mean, the character's a riot - hell, most of the new characters are - but the show just doesn't seem to exist for any reason beyond having a laugh at how stupid politicians and celebrities and regular people are. I mean, fuck, look around! We all have Twitter and Facebook, we all know full well how stupid everyone else is!

The worst and most annoying character was an InfoWars-style idiot called Billy Wayne or something like that, who just used illogical arguments and false data to tell, for instance, Bernie Sanders that "everyone can be part of the one percent," or to pass climate change off to Jill Stein as seasonal temperature fluctuation. This isn't funny! It's exhausting. You can go anywhere on the Internet and find a thousand such idiots every day.

I think what separates a show like this from Baron Cohen's earlier work is, frankly, ten or fifteen years of cultural change. Time was, if you posed as a foreigner doing interviews for an Austrian or Kazakhstani TV show, you could get Americans to really let their guard down, say some things they might not be proud to reveal to their friends and families and neighbors. Now, everyone's just a blathering idiot, perfectly comfortable putting their full name next to opinions like "I fully support locking crime alien kids in jail at the border" for the entire world to see. Even ten years ago, Sarah Palin was already making an enormous ass out of herself on national news.

Like, it really might have been something if Sacha Baron Cohen somehow, in disguise, got some U.S. official to admit to rigging elections, or got O.J. Simpson to admit to murdering his wife, or whatever. But he didn't! Seriously, this whole show accomplished nothing, and none of its characters are going down as being remotely as memorable as Ali G, Borat, or Bruno. Oh well!