Dark tales of our connected age

American Vandal brings out the deeply invasive nature of social media, among other things

In its first season, the Netflix Original series American Vandal looked at the case of Dylan Maxwell, a delinquent who painted penises on the cars of his school teachers. The fictional show followed the true-crime format, interviewing students and members of the staff to zero down on Mr Maxwell’s guilt. 

The show worked because it combined high investigation with unsophisticated humour. Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck), the teen detectives who worked on the case, brought a charming honesty to their mission, even when it was uncovering something that is harder to discuss in polite society than the work of more hardened sleuths.

In its second season, which Netflix released earlier this month, American Vandal returns to a new case, this time involving faeces. In November 2017, students at a Catholic high school in Washington poop en masse on school property after drinking lemonade laced with powerful laxatives. The incident is the brainwork of a student, who calls himself the Turd Burglar, and Mr Maldonado and Mr Ecklund are recruited to figure out his identity.

In true-crime fashion, the duo is approached by Chloe Lyman (Taylor Dearden) who is certain that her friend Kevin McClain (Travis Tope), the student accused of perpetrating what comes to be known as the Brownout, is innocent. It is up to Mr Maldonado and Mr Ecklund to verify her claims.

Meanwhile, two other poop-related crimes are reported on campus and in each case, the Turd Burglar boasts before and after the incident of his ability to pull them off. Going into the show — and this is something that happened with Season 1 too — it is easy to dismiss the goings-on as the weird, puerile imaginings of creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda. What, after all, can you expect from a show based in a high school and focusing on scat?

But American Vandal upturns these expectations by dovetailing its less-than-salutary premise with a sombre look into American society and the modern age. Each of the poop crimes are ultimately revealed to be the handiwork of different people, all blackmailed into performing these egregious pranks on pain of having their intimate photos leaked.

The mastermind is Grayson Wentz (Jeremy Culhane), a student who has been expelled for posting explicit tweets from a school computer. To seek vengeance, Mr Wentz steals the online identity of a girl and catfishes a number of students and at least one teacher, four of whom fall for his elaborate guise and send him damaging photos, which he then threatens to expose, if they refuse to do his bidding.

American Vandal thus presents a scathing commentary on the vicious side-effects of our connected age. One of Mr Wentz’s chief complaints with the school administration was the favoured treatment received by star athletes who get away with much worse than what he was thrown out for. One of his targets is champion basketball player DeMarcus Tillman (Melvin Gregg), the most popular kid in the school.

Mr Tillman too falls for his ruse. “I wanted to feel real,” he tells Mr Maldonado and Mr Ecklund in the season’s final episode. This need to “feel real” is a recurring theme on the show as traditionally successful people struggle to make sense of their prestige and whether it is earned. That they fall for the words of a non-entity, someone they have never met in real life, indicates the depth of the malaise afflicting millennials, those who were born into the internet age and marked most of life’s milestones in the world of bits and bytes.

Finally, American Vandal brings out the deeply invasive nature of social media. Mr Wentz’s victims include the girl whose identity he stole, and it is a measure of the paradox of extreme connectedness that Mr Maldonado and Mr Ecklund fail to discover who she really is for too long. One of her videos used by Mr Wentz has her address her boyfriend not by name but as “Pickle”. Nearly every one of those catfished by Mr Wentz latched on to the tenderness of the moniker.

At the end of Season 1, there was little clarity on whether Mr Maxwell was indeed the penis-painter. Swarmed by accusations, though, he was willing to confess that he was, a fatalism that was deeply troubling in a young man. Season 2 is no less nerve-wracking in describing a social malaise whose victims are, by a wide majority, the young. American Vandal has trained its sights on exposing the dark, pervasive underbelly of what is generally acknowledged as an unmitigated good of our age.

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