100 Favorite Shows: #87 — American Vandal
“I just smoked a victory blunt for no reason and now I’m upsettingly high.”
After the explosion of true crime documentaries and podcasts that captivated the world’s attention, it was only a matter of time until the genre received a master parody. That was the identity of American Vandal, a Peabody Award-winning series on Netflix that was created by Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda. The series focused on two high school students turned documentary filmmakers, Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck). Together, they investigated such pressing mysteries as season one’s “who drew the dicks?” on faculty cars at Hanover High School and season two’s “who is the ‘Turd Burglar’?” at the Catholic school, St. Bernadine. It lasted just these two seasons (in 2017 and 2018) before Netflix canceled it, but the ludicrously vulgar actions of high school students provided a lens for social commentary that made American Vandal unexpectedly sharp.
(American Vandal spoilers are included in this essay. It’s a mystery series so, you know, that goes double.)
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what American Vandal is sending up, beyond an entire genre/phenomenon that seems hellbent on captivating American culture interminably. The Serial podcast felt as big as Game of Thrones during its first season. Everyone had a hot take on Making a Murderer. But there really wasn’t that much different about these stories from those I.D. based crime/mystery programs that invited at-home viewers to follow along on a true story.
American Vandal owes a debt to older programs like Unsolved Mysteries, yes, but it’s mostly playing off of the recent boom of these true crime documentaries that unfurl one story over the course of multiple episodes, revealing seminal moments at the tail ends of installments. The entire industry (from Karen Kilgariff to (questionably) Richard Simmons) is geared around enticing viewers to tune in next time to learn more, rather than wrapping up the stories in just an hour as networks used to achieve.
Most of the time, these true crime docs revolve around murders or abductions (or, in specific instances, military desertions). On American Vandal, though, they revolved around two specific criminal mystery identities: Who drew the dicks and who did the shits. The first season is an impressive illustration about the pressures teenagers are under in the social media age through the lens of graffiti penises on faculty vehicles. The second season dabbles with a different kind of pressure by thrusting Peter and Sam (now hired guns for prank-solving) into a Catholic school, where the parents have lofty expectations for their children (who instead invert a mission trip to Costa Rica into a disguised spring break).
Throughout each of the stories, the commitment to the format never bends. Structurally and tonally, the episodes are played as straight as possible, allowing the joke of taking dicks and shit seriously to be comedy enough for the viewers. These are, of course, the viewers who shake their heads with laughter at the lines delivered by actors posing as faux-pensive high school students before realizing they’re entirely engrossed in the mystery at play.
(While the true crime docuseries format is the one most satirized by American Vandal, the invention of the Turd Burglar persona — complete with vague threats and an unknown identity — is aligned with the Zodiac killer, especially considering the serial excretory pranks he levies, which revolve around fecal piñatas and advent calendars.)
Most of the humor is not simply wrung from the fact that characters (including school faculty members) say “dicks” and “shit” as much as they possibly can. Rather, it’s derived from how realistically depicted the high schools are in American Vandal. Sure, the idea of spray-painting phalluses is incredibly trivial, but every kid interviewed for the series treats it like it’s the most important thing that’s happened to their school because, from their purview, it genuinely might be.
“I’m actually writing answers on the whiteboard instead of dicks,” Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro) relays in one talking head by the end of the first arc. The entire project is initially geared around proving Dylan innocent. As one of the most popular and most careless kids in school, Dylan is an easy one to blame for a crime associated with his proclivity for drawing dicks (whether on whiteboards or vehicles). Beyond his innocence or guilt, Dylan feels so authentic to a high school student I experienced as a peer in the twenty-first century. He’s not an outright bully, but he is dismissive of other cliques. He’s not a complete burnout, but he’s just not keen on studying at all, unaware that (in the American school system) excessive misbehavior will demolish his aspirations of higher learning.
Every character feels real and lived-in, as if Perrault and Yacenda thumbed through their yearbooks and developed characters from their former classmates. Even the communities depicted are stuffed full of the kind of middle class minutiae typically reserved for Instagram’s Middle Class Fancy.
The best example comes in the story from “Climax” about Coach Rafferty (Sean Carrigan) developing a reputation (the gossip of which is also a realistic element of small town America) for womanizing. This includes his relations with “Tongue Ring Tanya” at the local mall’s Applebee’s. However, season two also features a plot point that could have been ripped right from my own high school. The character of “Hot Janitor” (Cayleb Long) is introduced in “Wiped Clean” as the object of many girls’ affections and Snapchat stories (he also serves as the local shrooms hook-up). Eventually, after the school is riddled with students shitting themselves explosively, Hot Janitor quits and is replaced with a new janitor, who thinks that his predecessor quit “because of all the shit,” rather than because of the unwanted attention he was receiving. Knowing small town sleazeballs who sell drugs to kids, Hot Janitor probably never tried to shut down the use of his nickname.
The use of Snapchat, among other prevalent social media apps, is key to understanding just what facet of modern high school life Vandal is most interested in provoking. Whether it’s sharing innocuous videos and images, posting endless status updates, or feeling genuine toxicity from those who only bully in comment sections rather than in person, social media is harshly pervasive in the school setting of the 2010s.
It makes Kevin “Shit Stain” McClain (Travis Tope) feel that there’s no one on his side in the case of his house arrest as a result of Turd Burglar suspicion. Kevin may not be as popular as DeMarcus (Melvin Gregg), but he neglects the few friends who fight doggedly on his side. Just because kids on social media dismiss his suspension in favor of hoping that more poop crimes are threatened as a way to cancel classes, it doesn’t mean that he’s alone in his fight.
The inverse is true of Mackenzie Wagner (Camille Ramsey) in season one. On the surface (as we see on Instagram profiles), Mackenzie’s life was perfect. She had everyone in her corner if you evaluate follower tallies, but she felt completely isolated at home. Her parents divorced (Coach Rafferty’s meddling again), her friends called her a psycho behind her back, Dylan put a Boomerang on Instagram of her shotgunning a beer, causing them to break up. In the 2010s, though, this talk doesn’t just filter through hallway conversations and side-eyes in class. It’s plastered across social media to the point where Mackenzie sees Instagram as more weapon than tool (even in the case of a deeply modern “Home bored” “Latergram,” which Peter and Sam see as an alibi and which Dylan sees as an invitation to come over). If Kevin and Mackenzie met, they’d be so desperate to switch places, wanting what the other has. But never realizing that social media dictates that neither has either.
The social commentary extended to extract profundity from these social media feuds and trivial crimes centered around dicks and shit. Teachers are depicted as toxic contributors to the tortured school system and are just as responsible as the students who are thrust into it and churned out every four years. It’s more direct in season two when Ms. Wexler (Barbara Deering) orders a cover-up of a fourth poop prank in an effort to maintain Kevin’s forced confession as the scapegoat for the school’s plight. (This also applies to Mr. Fernandez (Gray Eubank), who screams at the interrogative Peter and Sam and prompts them to flee his classroom muttering to the camera, “He totally ate shit.”) However, the teachers’ impact on students is most chilling in season one, when it’s treated as just another trait of the school system.
No matter what, Dylan Maxwell would have always been a bit on the goofier side, but, in many ways, he’s forced into the life of buffoonery and recklessness throughout high school because that’s exactly what his peers and teachers expect him to be like. When teachers treat a student with hopelessness and don’t even bother to foster a connection with him, then they’re just going to play more into those preconceptions. When teachers see only what they want to see, students like Dylan never stand a chance to prove themselves as something more. Without the intervention of Peter and Sam’s documentary, high school might have defined the rest of Dylan’s life. In the worst instance, they’d ruin his life.
Peter and Sam’s documentary is not completely faultless and golden, though. The commentaries on American Vandal manage to go to the next level by investigating the need for tell-all true crime series in the first place. “It’s so easy for you to sit there behind that stupid camera and make accusations about people you don’t even know,” Mackenzie tells Peter at the end of “Climax.” This moment arises after she’s felt her life thoroughly derailed by the amount of information exposed across the interviews over “who drew the dicks.” She’s portrayed as a villain in the series and a ton of personal information is revealed (evidence of her affair is demanded to be shown to “everyone”). It’s hard for Mackenzie to even face her family, let alone an entire school that now knows every dirty secret of hers.
It’s a scene that also calls into question the motive for Peter and Sam’s documentary in the first place. At first, it started out as a savior piece for Dylan Maxwell against an unjust suspension. By Mackenzie’s outburst, though, it’s morphed into a hit piece through which they can voice their frustrations with all of their peers, founded or baseless, fair or unfair. It’s hardly an ethical practice throughout season one, but it also presents these ideas as the genre perhaps being unethical altogether. American Vandal, for all its authenticity, is most sincere when it is mocking the stories that entertain us. Especially when they destroy the lives of those at the center of them.
I never would have expected so much to chew on from such a seemingly innocuous series. The acclaim for American Vandal (it won a damn Peabody!) was surprising to me, simply because I felt that a Serial parody would be more geared around the jokes rather than actually presenting a cultural commentary on par with what we derived from the dismaying tale of Adnan Syed and the Best Buy payphone. However, American Vandal was one of the breakout centerpieces of acclaim back in 2017, thanks in large part to the completed vision from Perrault and Yacenda, which was their story to tell throughout.
I wish Netflix would get back to this brand of television. Keeping their hands off, trusting the creators, and investing in solid idea that have room to grow as word of mouth spreads and reviews lavish praise upon the original ideas. (Maybe The Queen’s Gambit will be a step closer to that return?) Instead, Netflix canceled American Vandal, even before the “three season curse” could be reached at all. Regardless of what the future dictates for the streaming service or the series (which is allegedly being shopped to other outlets), we got to have two seasons that told us a little more about life as a teenager in modern American society. Both in terms of navigating a flurry of social media DMs and navigating a school day without getting covered in shit.
