Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj Review
Up until now, Netflix’s success foraying into political talk shows has been marginal at best. My most effective illustration of this? I didn’t watch a single episode of a single one of their original political talk shows until the premiere of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. To be fair, I am more familiar with Minhaj’s comedy work than with the work of the other hosts on Netflix, but I do like Michelle Wolf, for example! Why didn’t I watch her show? Why did I tune into Patriot Act within a week and a half of its premiere? Maybe I don’t have the self-awareness to totally know the answer, but the show got great buzz from critics that I like and follow and so I checked it out and immediately got hooked.
In the opening episode, Minhaj tackles affirmative action. He focuses specifically on the people of various Asian backgrounds who are trying to eliminate affirmative action in the admissions process at Harvard and other universities around the country. Minhaj structures the episode as almost a letter from him to other Asians. This approach gives the episode a sense of community and cultural specificity while still being widely accessible to non-Asian people. If Minhaj were a white guy talking down to Asian Americans, he would be the worst — but because he is a member of the community, he is making a vital contribution to the discussion surrounding affirmative action. Minhaj’s jokes always draw from a deep well of cultural knowledge that speak to people with shared experiences while still being funny to everyone else. If you watched his stand-up special Homecoming King, you’ll understand what I mean. Minhaj’s grasp on comedy needs no improvement.
The other two episodes that have come out so far (a new episode is released every Sunday) center on Saudi Arabia and Amazon — and both do excellent deep dives into the scary undercurrents of these subjects. A major part of Minhaj’s effectiveness is that he’s hilarious while being incredibly informative, which brings to mind the heyday of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, although Minhaj doesn’t do interviews and rather than focusing on the given news of the day, he focuses on one topic per episode. So the show is actually more like Last Week Tonight than a daily political commentary/comedy show and the formula works very well with Minhaj’s commanding stage presence. Minhaj uses his presence to keep the audience’s attention throughout each episode; he’s up on stage entirely by himself and he doesn’t even have a desk to hide behind. That ability to make the stage work for him allows Minhaj to deliver incisive and biting political commentary at the same time that he’s cracking jokes. Up there in front of the audience, he can get away with anything and everything. Patriot Act is both a show for our particular political moment but will no doubt adapt itself to many more moments to come.
