Weird City

Created by: Charlie Sanders & Jordan Peele

Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Ed O’Neill, LeVar Burton, Rosario Dawson, Michael Cera, Mark Hamill, Laverne Cox, Sara Gilbert, Steven Yeun, Gillian Jacobs, Awkwafina, Yvette Nicole Brown, Auliʻi Cravalho

Weird City is an interesting cross between Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, and the Key and Peele Show. Indeed, Jordan Peele is one of the creators of the show, and his influence is evident.

It’s a science fiction anthology series, near future, and often showcasing the interactions between people and new technology. In Black Mirror, you expect the protagonist to get killed or horribly transfigured in some way, or at least end up fucking a live pig on national television in the hope of saving the kidnapped princess. It’s a very British show, and has a strong element of ‘Everybody dies, hilarity ensues’ to it.

Sanders and Peele are somewhat kinder to their characters, and in some of the episodes the characters get to the end of the story line only slightly scathed. Not always, mind you. That would be boring.

Weird City is, well, a weird city. It has two halves, “Above the Line” (ABL) and “Below the Line” (BTL). ABL is gleaming, modern, immaculate, filled with vacuous, happy, pretentious yuppies. BTL is the San Fernando Valley: some areas are nicer than others, and the people are pretty much ordinary people.

Despite the evident class tensions such an arrangement would create, the Line is guarded by apathetic and obviously underpaid security guards who seem more interested in desultory ID checks than in doing any actual guarding.

BTL seems to pay scant attention to ATL, content to merely be left alone. ATL feels much the same way, except for virtue-signaling yups who decide they simply must foster a child from BTL. The video representations on ATL phones of the “third world children of BTL” is startlingly similarity to some of the TV shows about African Americans from the 70s.

Somewhat surprisingly, the tensions and humor of the show avoid the racial components that make up a good part of Peele’s egg. I speculate that Peele may have decided he wanted to show he could write brilliant material that didn’t lean on that particular plot device, and indeed, it turns out he can.

While there’s elements of people versus technology (Mark Hamill is brilliant as voice over for a smart house that has personality issues) it’s mostly people tripping over, misunderstanding and just generally interfering with other people, and the result is funny, smart, and very human.

If I may risk widespread ridicule, if Black Mirror was obsidian, dark, brilliant and sharp edged, then Weird City is rose quartz, warmer, with more visible depths, and comes to a point. Aaand I probably just alienated every writer and geologist reading this.

But whether you prefer science fiction or pyroclastic flow, watch Weird City. It features the tragic death of a cantaloupe, and the most creative use of household plumbing you’ll ever see or want not to think about. It’s worth it.

Six episodes, 23-29 minutes. Now on You Tube.