Trigger warnings all around
‘Office’ alum crafts social satires ranging from sharp to puerile
“The Premise” is the second new FX on Hulu miniseries this week striving to be as relevant as tomorrow’s Twitter feed. But unlike “Y: The Last Man,” which premiered Monday, Sept. 13, this anthology show created and hosted by B.J. Novak is also determined to be funny. Spoiler alert: Some won’t think it is.
All five half-hour episodes — the first two of which start streaming Thursday, Sept. 16, with a new one dropping each Thursday through Oct. 7 — are unapologetic social satires,
and satire notoriously evades a large audience. Additionally, each story skewers pretensions of either the woke or the reactionary sets, in some cases both, and the most effective ones do it the dirtiest.
So trigger warnings all around, with recommendations to folks who like to chuckle at things others don’t find funny.
Novak, an alum of “The Office,” wrote or co-wrote each “Premise” episode. Episodes tackle race, police misconduct, gun control, celebrity
culture, online harassment, self-help affirmation, bullying, high finance, marketing psychology and more. It’s a wide range of topics, some of which are approached with complex, high intelligence and others with puerile, winking predictability.
All of them are played like straight drama by a canny cast, no matter how absurd dialogue or events get. There’s a good deal of speechifying, but the comic tone of the show is so dry it’s hard to tell when Novak wants to promote the ideals his compromised characters espouse from when he’s just giving them enough rope. If that’s a flaw, it’s one that should be cultivated; not always knowing what to think can be a refreshing remedy to judgmental toxicity.
Each tale’s title gives some warning of what you’re about to get.
“Social Justice Sex Tape” shows what can happen when a selfstyled white ally (Ben Platt of “Dear Evan Hansen”) brings his homemade sex tape with exonerating evidence to Black lawyers (Ayo Edebiri of “Dickinson” and Tracee Ellis Ross) defending an activist charged with assaulting a cop.
Not as explicit but in its way more provocative is “The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler,” in which the narcissistic title pop star (Lucas Hedges) offers to sleep with the next valedictorian at his old high school. Kaitlyn Dever (“Booksmart,” “Last Man Standing”) is a radical class-cutter and, in one of his last appearances, Ed Asner plays a cranky history teacher; together they rhetorically demolish the whole education-indoctrination system.
To complete the show’s prurient triptych, “Butt Plug” charts the effort to make a worldchanging sex toy by a superrich financier (Daniel Dae Kim of “Lost”) and his childhood tormentor (Eric Lange of “Brand New Cherry Flavor”). Believe it or not, this innuendo-laced plunge into product development reaches a spiritual height for the series.
That’s the key issue for Lola Kirke’s inspirational Instagram star when she encounters “The Commenter,” the lone troll who calls B.S. on every aspect of her perfect life feed. And in the slowboil suspenseful installment “Moments of Silence,” dead-aim Jon Bernthal’s real plans for his new job as a gun lobby publicist remain a moving target until the end.
Some will accuse Novak of taking easy swings at low-hanging piñatas about to burst with mockable topics. Regardless, the premises within “The Premise” yield stories crafted with care and played out with sincere commitment — even when it’s all in the service of snide irony.