Reviewing a Year No One Wants to Remember
In the opening moments of Netflix’s year in review mockumentary, Death to 2020, the off-camera interviewer asks journalist Dash Bracket, played by Samuel L. Jackson, to relive some of the events of 2020. Bracket promptly replies, “Why in the fuck would you want to do that?”
Both Netflix and Amazon released comedy specials about the (inhales deeply) unprecedented year humanity just experienced. Because I am apparently a glutton for punishment, I decided to watch both.
I started with Amazon’s (because it was shorter), Yearly Departed, which took the format of a funeral for the year 2020. Unfortunately for them, this conceit was already used to much greater affect in Jordan E. Cooper’s 2019 play Ain’t No Mo, a satire about the Black American experience. The first vignette in the play takes place on November 4, 2008 in a Black church during a very lively funeral service for Brother “Righttocomplain” as the community celebrates President Obama’s election and, supposedly, the end to their suffering. For many reasons, Yearly Departed fell short of Cooper’s genius.
Phoebe Robinson, co-host of podcast/TV special 2 Dope Queens and author of absolutely hilarious books, was the host of the funeral, and a small handful of female comedians each got to eulogize something we lost in 2020. I liked that it was an all female cast (barring a literally one line cameo from one of my favorite actors) that was both racially diverse and diverse in terms of comedic style and career trajectory. Tiffany Haddish set the bar high with her opening eulogy for casual sex, but the following monologues varied greatly in quality. Rachel Brosnahan commemorated pants, and although I love her performance as Mrs. Maisel, Brosnahan is no stand-up comic. She just plays one on TV.
My favorite eulogies were delivered by Natasha Rockwell, one of my favorite actors/writers on Insecure, who mourned buddy cop TV shows, and Ziwe Fumodoh, who lamented the loss of beige band-aids. Both sets allowed Black women to poke fun at the attempts of corporations to “solve” racism by doing the bare minimum. Both women also provided me a lot of laughter whenever the camera would cut to them during the other women’s sets, their reactions were often funnier than what was being said.
The special is only about an hour long, and while the quality of each monologue varied greatly, hands down my favorite part was the blooper reel that rolled over the credits. You realize that a lot of these women were not in fact in the same room together and VFX was used to make it look like they were. Watching Sarah Silverman attempt to deliver a comedic eulogy to the slogan “Make America Great Again” seems to be a pretty good summary of 2020.
Following Yearly Departed, I moved on to Netflix’s Death to 2020, which based on production values alone made Amazon’s special look like a home movie. Overall, I enjoyed Death to 2020 more, but it really came down to the actors doing a lot with material that wasn’t very good.
The mockumentary featured various A-listers playing an assortment of archetypes of the 2020 experience. Lisa Kudrow as a non-official political spokeswoman, Joe Keery as a woke millennial who makes YouTube videos, and Cristin Millioti as a self-described soccer mom were a few of my favorites. However, the narration and through line of the film was sloppy. You could tell the writers were trying to make fun of both sides, which was successful when including character like the woke YouTuber and the soccer mom, but didn’t translate when the narrator tried to make comparable jokes about Donald Trump an Joe Biden. While there is truly endless reasons to make fun of both of them, the Biden jokes felt incredibly forced and were almost entirely focused on his age. It felt like someone at Netflix had read the draft and had to give the note, “Conservatives watch Netflix, too.”
Additionally, the film included coverage of the outrage in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests that dominated the early summer, and rightfully chose not to make fun of them, leaving most of the commentary to Jackson’s character as well as Leslie Jones’ behavioral psychologist character. Even though I think they made a wise decision by avoiding a potential hot bed of drama, it felt out of place amongst every other issue that was readily made fun of- from coronavirus to climate change to the US election to Brexit. Unfortunately, I think in many ways, we are still too close to the events of 2020 to be able to make good satirical art about it. I’m not one to find many topics too sacred to joke about, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make jokes about difficult topics actually funny.
Overall, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend either of these specials, but I am interested to see how 2020 will be portrayed in arts and culture in year to come. Will 2020 books be the new World War II books every dad gets for Christmas? Will films about the coronavirus be automatic Oscar-bait? Will there be a seven-hour surrealist Broadway show unpacking everything that’s happened this year? Who’s to say? Only time will tell.