‘Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later’ is another pleasant indulgence of perpetual infantilism
When the Wet Hot American Summer franchise (as it has, hilariously, now become) gets it right — it gets it really right. I launched a college radio show last October, and for the first piece of music played on our premiere show, I chose “Higher & Higher” from the WHAS soundtrack. It’s an awesome song, and is evidence of the pathological extent to which this stuff has won me over. I spent the 8 episodes — 4 hours — of this new, possibly final, incarnation of the WHAS brand awaiting a performance of “Higher & Higher” as face-meltingly awesome as Chris Pine, guitar in hand, on the cabin roof in the final episode of 2015’s First Day of Camp Netflix series, and alas such a sequence never came. Maybe it’s better not to be repetitive, but what Ten Years Later — a proudly messy summer release that feels like extraordinarily inessential viewing — desperately lacks is anything as iconic as that, or several other moments, from the original 2001 film and that 2015 series.
The creation of Michael Showalter and David Wain, Wet Hot is a strange property, both a parody of 90s teen sex comedies like American Pie and a very sincere celebration of 80s American childhood. Most of it plays like a bunch of relatively-polished SNL skits strung together by implausible narrative. In Ten Years Later, the campers of 1981 reunite as promised in ’91 — now disillusioned with the modern world and desperate to partake in some good old adolescent hedonism. There’s the ‘big names’ — Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Ken Marino — and some lesser-known players with bigger roles — Showalter himself and Michael Ian Black play 2 characters each, and are the delightful backbone of the series. There’s also a bunch of characters who were introduced in 2015, shoehorned in awkwardly to fill time — Lake Bell, Kristen Wiig, Josh Charles. Then there’s Elizabeth Banks, who’s in a handful of episodes but never shares the frame with any original WHAS co-stars: the result of scheduling, feuding, or BOTH? And Bradley Cooper has been recast with Adam Scott, who claims he’s “gotten a nose job”.
4 hours of intermittently-amusing camp antics ensue. The main novelty of First Day of Camp was seeing these fortysomething comedians playing 15-year kids; now they’re just… obnoxious adults. A plot involving Michael Ian Black and Adam Scott and a psycho babysitter is predictable, unfunny and stretched out endlessly, clearly just as filler. Ken Marino losing his virginity works a bit better; Amy Poehler dealing with an asshole Australian boyfriend (Jai Courteney, better than usual) has its moments. The use of Ronald Reagan as antagonist again (now with added George H.W. Bush — it is the 90s!) displays a certain lack of imagination. The most enjoyable part of Ten Years Later, unsurprisingly, is the storyline featuring Chris Meloni, Molly Shannon, Jason Schwartzman and Chris Pine. Yes, it forces us to watch a talking tin of soup having sex with a woman — skip this sequence if you can — but these characters are significantly more fun to spend time with than anyone back at Camp Firewood. Forced to disarm one of Reagan’s nukes, Pine and Schwartzman visibly have a better understanding of the innermost joke of WHAS than almost anyone else on screen.
At a time when David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, another thoroughly 1990s property, is slogging away on Showtime, deconstructing the very nature of nostalgia, everything about Wet Hot: Ten Years Later’s own brand of nostalgia-bait feels very much unearned, rushed and lacking in any real magic. It’s not like Wet Hot American Summer was ever that great to begin with. But Ten Years Later has arrived with so little hype or investment from Netflix (an expensive helicopter shot is knowingly watermarked TRIAL EDITION FOR HOME USE ONLY), it’s hard to begrudge it for not being ‘classic’ television.
