The Andy Milonakis Show: The Complete First Season (review)

There is something seriously fucking creepy and brain-rattling disturbing about a 30-year-old man with a hormone disorder that makes him look like a 12-year-old starring in his own show purporting to be the random video diaries of a bored 12-year-old, particularly when the rationale for the presentation of the video diaries appears to be Let’s Laugh At The Fat Retarded Kid. It’s almost as if Milonakis is suffering from some particularly perverse form of self-inflicted pedophilia and is inviting us to gawp at him as his disease folds in on itself. “Kid Andy” accosts his elderly neighbors with somebody-forgot-his-meds non sequiturs, smears peanut butter on his face, bewilders poor Chinese-food delivery men with junior-high-school pranks, slobbers breakfast cereal all over himself, and moans and rocks for the camera like an autistic. (The set’s extras are more of the same.) Viewers who “get” the brand of preadolescent comedy that saturates these eight episodes dub it “absurd,” but the freeform video chaos here is haphazard, arbitrary, and meaningless — not meaningless in an existential way that highlights the senselessness of the universe, the inevitable pain of humanity, or any other actual absurd concepts, but meaningless as in merely empty-headed. If there’s anything absurd here, it’s only accidental: after causing a splash online and appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Milonakis “graduated” to this MTV2 show, and there’s something desperately awful and inadvertantly telling about the anti-intellectualism of American society that an adult man could succeed in passing for a dim-witted child and be celebrated for it.