American Vandal

Maybe it seems like a stretch to call a show about dick jokes and poop one of the most well-crafted and self-aware works to come out of the last few years, but in season two, American Vandal has only continued to surpass expectations.

It feels like a successful attempt to franchise-ify American Vandal’s peculiar mix of lowbrow comedy, highbrow style, and an ongoing portrait of the American high school as a clash between dueling realities, where the best truths are always fiction.

The season is less absurdist than its predecessor, and the majority of its characters are less vividly drawn. ... Yet, as before, the mystery is diverting, filled with nifty twists and perfect for bingeing. And, once again, the show’s creators and performers manage to, almost without us noticing it, shift tones and move between moods. What starts out as an ornate scatalogical lark ends like an episode of “Black Mirror,” as produced by a high-school A.V. club.

While the second season of Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda’s Netflix series might not have the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of its first, it’s a worthy followup, and in some ways more effective and ambitious than its first.

Creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault get plenty of laughs this time around, but it’s often because the actors have crafted such full Christopher Guest-like characters. These suspects have layers and they’re infinitely worth peeling away.

Emotionally and sociologically, it’s a much more complex story, with a lot of insightful and empathetic things to say about a generation of kids who have grown up with social media as part of their lives. And characters like Kevin, Chloe and school basketball star DeMarcus (Melvin Gregg) come to life in poignant and unexpected ways, even considering the emotional pivot Season One took by the end.

Once you start watching the eight episodes, it's hard not to get hooked on solving the mystery, even if the show lays it on a bit thick when it comes to opining about the impact social media has on young people growing up in a world that allows them--or is that forces them?--to construct online personas to broadcast their every move via smart phones, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and endless selfies.

American Vandal season 2 is not only more ambitious than its predecessor but shockingly darker and more inventive.

By the second or third episodes I realized I was actually trying to figure out the case, which was never the case with the dick-drawing and the desire to bring the last few episodes became much more about getting answers than just simple amusement. In fact, I barely laughed at all in the season's homestretch, proving that while American Vandal may function as a parody/satire of Serial and The Staircase and The Jinx, it's just as capable of being a moody Encyclopedia Brown for the new millennium.

American Vandal’s second season has bigger ideas than its first, and the turn toward wistfulness in its final episode feels less forced this time around. But apart from Kevin and DeMarcus Tillman (Melvin Gregg), a black star athlete bused into wealthy St Bernadine’s from a poor neighborhood, Hoop Dreams–style, few of its characters are as well-drawn, and the use of more experienced actors--cast members have recurred on Boardwalk Empire, Sweet/Vicious, UnReal, and L.A. Law--robs it of some of the first season’s amateur authenticity.

American Vandal is filled with thoroughly sketched, instantly recognizable high-school types, but Kevin is a logjam of too many idiosyncrasies, and the series offers only the most cursory explanations for his quirks.