The Premise asks us to think more critically about the state of our culture
The Premise asks us to think more critically about the state of our culture
B.J. Novak's return to television, in five self-contained 30-minute long episodes, is pretty good. At its worst, it's self-important and uneven in its tone, but at its best, it's exceptional.
B.J. Novak, best known as Ryan Howard - that high-on-himself, douche-y guy, from the hit NBC cultural phenomenon, The Office, is back in the director/writer/exec producer chair with the new FX on Hulu show, The Premise.
Novak, who has spent the better half of his time since The Office writing books (including a children’s book and an anthology of short stories) even used some of his in between time to create a list app which Goop endorsed but which is no longer, because as you may have guessed, Google and Apple were hot on his trail and they have access to the lion’s share of the mobile device industry where they can pre-configure phones and tablets with their own note or list-taking applications. So yeah, there’s that.
Novak’s latest endeavor, The Premise, is an ambitious undertaking which covers some heady topics: race relations, liberal woke-ness, gun lobby, social media’s messing with our psyche and the quest for status at all costs, celebrity worship, and the balance of mercy and revenge as penance for childhood bullying.
It doesn’t sit firmly in any one category. It’s not comedy. It’s not drama. It’s not a documentary. It’s sometimes whimsical, somewhat satire, and for the episodes that get it right (namely Episode 2: Moment of Silence and Episode 5: Butt Plug), it demands that we stop, watch, listen, suspend our judgement, and eradicate the predisposition we have to our attachments and beliefs, or the premise, that we started with.
If you can’t commit to all episodes, here are the ones you should watch:
Episode 2: Moment of Silence
The Premise: Jon Bernthal (Walking Dead, The Punisher, Daredevil) plays a grieving father named Chase whose daughter was the victim of school shooting a year ago. He then goes to work at the NGL (National Gun Lobby - think NRA stand-in) in a PR role where he befriends Boyd Holbrook’s character, Aaron - a southerner who grew up in a gun enthusiast household with his dad hunting for their food. What are Chase’s motivations with taking the job? The clues seems to signal he wants to take down the NGL but it’s not clear.
What flips your thinking, questioning “The Premise”: It would have been easy to make Holbrook into an evil gun-loving cartoony 2-dimensional character, but here he’s not. He really cares and he listens and he grows more and more concerned for his new friend as certain signals seem to suggest Chase is an unbalanced individual who knows a little too much about how to shoot guns accurately, carries too much emotional baggage, and has an unease about him at all times.
The Point: The entire episode is a well-paced march to the end, the event where there will be a “moment of silence.” It’s tension-packed but slow and steady pressure rising, like hearing water in a kettle brought to a boil before the final ding.
Episode 3: The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler
The Premise: High school pop star/prodigal son Jesse Wheeler comes back to his high school and donates money for a new library and offers up to the student who achieves the highest honor of academic excellence, Valedictorian status, a tour of his mansion and sex. Naturally the proposition of sex has the school itself, the parents, the kids and the school board all in a tizzy. It also motivates Abbi (Kaitlyn Dever) to stop her truancy and her act together.
What flips your thinking, questioning “The Premise”: Is Jesse a little like a Bieber type persona? Yes, especially his relationship with the hip pastor in the show, who bears more than a striking resemblance to disgraced Hillsong pastor, Carl Lentz, to whom Bieber had been faithful to for a long time. Jesse invokes God on the fly whenever he feels like he needs guidance or a chat. Does it feel ridiculous? Yes, but the point is…
The Point: The opium of the people has long been religion (to quote Karl Marx) and which gets fumbled in execution literally on the show (which I believe is meant to be ironic) so why should the cult of celebrity worship with his hymns and its own rituals be worth any less that those mythologies.
Wheeler is de-stigmatizing the act of sex and exercising the ultimate in his privilege and, symbolically his white male celebrity savior form, by offering his body up for sex to the student who works hardest. Far fetched? Maybe, but Ed Asner as the history teacher (and likely his last role before he died) is divine and Kaitlyn Dever as the raddest teenager who ever lived even though she would never truthfully be Valedictorian, is something to behold.
Episode 5: Butt Plug
The Premise: Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) plays a very wealthy CEO, Daniel Jung who was mercilessly bullied as a child by his classmate, Eli, (Eric Lange) who is now in the market for a new job, new inspiration, and a bit of a professional makeover. Eli’s wife advises him to contact Daniel and see if he can offer him work.
What flips your thinking, questioning “The Premise”: Eli lays out how awful he was to Daniel as a kid and it’s clear as an adult, Eli has experienced some emotional growth because he owns his behavior. Daniel, on the other hand is a bit of an ass. The assignment he gives Eli is to think outside the box and create a revolutionary butt plug. He has a year to do so before he goes up in front of the board of Daniel’s company to pitch his idea. The crazy thing is that Eli complies and I’m not sure if he even cares that he likely is being set up. He rises to the occasion and attacks his challenge with vigor and purpose.
The Point: There’s metaphors here of building ships and planks and whether people can change. Ultimately maybe that can’t but what the episode seems to point to is that people can experience growth and out of that growth comes change. Still, in the platter of mercy and revenge, the latter is a formidable opponent when it comes to righting the wrong of childhood bullying.
Honorable Mention: Lola Kirke (Mozart in the Jungle) as Allegra in Episode 4: The Commenter is good. While the subject of the episode - a self-affirming, wellness/lifestyle coach starts to doubt herself when she receives negative comments from a troll on her Instagram posts - was not my cup of tea, there’s a moment of truth and reckoning in Allegra’s spiraling at the hands of her new nemesis. That is, that amongst all the positive-isms Allegra hears from everyone in her physical and social media circle (including her shrink), the one person she can trust to tell her the truth about herself is the troll. It’s an unexpected and delightful twist. It calls into question truths about the cause and effect relationship of how settling into complacency and “everyone gets a prize” culture is the only option because the collective dialing down on unpleasant noise (muting conversations, unfollowing others) is so addictive when the cost of criticism to high for our egos rendering us unable to deal with any pain we may need to muster for growth.
In Closing: Many reviewers have doubted the success of the execution of the show (Exhibit A, B, C below), and while their critiques have merit, I’d argue that The Premise is a show worthy of your time for the very reason that whether you love it or hate it, it evokes strong feelings, and water cooler or virtual chatroom chatter, especially Episodes 2, 3, and 5.
The Premise doesn’t seem to have one (Rolling Stone)
“An Anthology of Now” - tagline for the show, the author argues feels like a Ryan Howard (Novak’s “The Office” character) inspired Dunder Mufflin “Infinity” phase catchphrase.
The Premise is Flawed (Vulture)
“That’s what The Premise really is: a series of episodes that each have their own gimmick. “Moment of Silence,” at least, is smart enough to not try to be funny. The other episodes try too hard and, too often, fail.”
The Premise: B.J. Novak drops five tall stories, and they don’t all land (Chicago Sun-Times)
"The new FX on Hulu anthology series “The Premise” is problematic but has promise, and try saying that three times fast — but if you CAN say it three times fast, make sure you capture the moment on your smart phone, because if you don’t post it did it ever really happen?
That’s the kind of meta-techno philosophy explored in this ambitiously cutting-edge if only occasionally successful series from B.J. Novak (“The Office,” “The Mindy Project”)”