Critic Reviews

Sophomoric at times, but painstakingly constructed throughout, it’s a thrilling mystery that feels true--from start to finish--to the real-life stories that inspired it.

Think Documentary Now! without the starry lineups, or Andy Samberg’s faux sports documentaries without as many tangents--and better yet, they manage to make a high-school dramedy work around the “documentary” itself. All in all, it’s an impressive tightrope walk.

It may take a little longer to get there than last time, but this new season becomes a worthy follow-up by not only swapping out one anatomical gag for another, but by filing off some of its goofier edges for another grounded look at the other daily challenges of high school life.

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.

American Vandal isn't a great show, but it's a show that wildly and consistently exceeded my expectations, in large part because it evolves and becomes a much better and different show over its eight-episode run.

Few shows I've seen catch high school society, with its self-contained seriousness, as well as American Vandal does, as well as the mix of innocence and experience, confusion and certitude that mark that age. It’s as engrossing as the series it set out to satirize and moving in ways you would not expect.

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

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.