American Vandal

Think Documentary Now! without the starry lineups, or Andy Samberg’s faux sports documentaries without as many tangents--and better yet, they manage to make a high-school dramedy work around the “documentary” itself. All in all, it’s an impressive tightrope walk.

Few shows I've seen catch high school society, with its self-contained seriousness, as well as American Vandal does, as well as the mix of innocence and experience, confusion and certitude that mark that age. It’s as engrossing as the series it set out to satirize and moving in ways you would not expect.

American Vandal isn't a great show, but it's a show that wildly and consistently exceeded my expectations, in large part because it evolves and becomes a much better and different show over its eight-episode run.

In its assemblage of footage from Snapchat feeds and other social media sources, as well as its collection of solid teenage performances, American Vandal gets at something true about our obsession with whodunits and how every generation finds a new way to commit very old crimes.

Everyone involved with this show really commits to the format. That’s what makes American Vandal more compelling than I would have suspected, even though it does have some significant flaws.

It’s a funny idea, and when it clicks, in the early episodes, Vandal is pretty amusing. It’s not an idea that stretches effectively over eight episodes, though, even at a half-hour each. There are other things going on--including a critique of the motives and methods of the documentarians, in this case a couple of student film geeks--but they’re not all that interesting.