"Who Is America?": TV Review

[Ubiquitous]

Sacha Baron Cohen's new Showtime comedy is occasionally funny, but
it's hard to be outrageous in a world where ideologies that used to
be concealed are now proudly public.

Back in 2000, when Da Ali G Show premiered, people still had a
modicum of shame.

In Michaelangelo terms: If the grotesques targeted by Sacha Baron
Cohen in his genre-bending smash were perfect statues of ugliness,
"shame" was the extraneous rock that covered them in their public
personae, the temporary impediment Cohen had to carve away in his
mission to reveal human nature.

It's 2018 and shame is dead. The proudly deplorable parade through
the street in their hateful finery and tweet their slurs and
ignorance with pride, sometimes with anuran avatars and coy
usernames, but just as often associated with their own faces and
names. Your typical neo-Nazi need not hide as a block of marble when
he can walk proudly in his native form.

(If you're coming to this review from the right, simply substitute
pussy hats and proud adherence to socialism in that paragraph.)

Shame was the secret ingredient in Da Ali G Show, the obstacle that
had to be circumvented to make us believe that the effort Cohen put
into devising characters, picking his targets and insinuating
himself into their lives on-camera was worth the trouble.

Shame is the missing ingredient in Cohen's Who Is America? and,
unfortunately, it's not an ingredient that proves merely incidental.
It's the difference between shocking and not shocking, between
hilarious and simply fleetingly funny.

Cohen's new comedy, set to premiere on Sunday on Showtime and
already available online on all of Showtime's digital platforms,
arrives shrouded in the oddest sort of secrecy insofar as the pay
cabler only acknowledged the existence of the show last week and has
been able to mostly sit back and let figures like Roy Moore and
Sarah Palin handle publicity themselves. Whereas frustrated victims
on Da Ali G show were frequently embarrassed by the things they had
been captured saying and doing on camera, the Moores and Palins of
the world are more offended by the mere act of the duping. If you're
Roy Moore or Sarah Palin, the malicious acts of a misleading British
comedian are far worse than anything that might have been revealed
or exposed about themselves, since whatever fans those two have,
they already know what they stand for. Ditto whatever adversaries
they have.

The disappointing reality of Who Is America? is that Cohen hasn't
really gotten anybody to espouse any ideology that they wouldn't and
haven't advocated proudly without the subterfuge. We live in a world
in which barriers between public brand and private ideology have
essentially been erased. This show reveals Cohen, working under
gallons of latex that must somehow play more realistically in person
than onscreen, as a comic magician taking the stage after the prior
prestidigitator revealed how all the tricks were done. The degree to
which you haven't been paying any attention to the world will mirror
the degree to which you're amazed and probably amused by what Cohen
has perpetrated, just as the degree to which the subjects on-camera
are willfully myopic mirrors the extent to which they were duped.

The gimmick of Who Is America? fits within the parameters of Cohen's
established work. Over the two episodes I've seen — the second of
which I'm barely allowed to acknowledge I've seen — he plays five or
six characters. Those characters include, but are not limited to, an
InfoWars-esque conspiracy theorist with a Texas accent and a
mobility scooter, a balding NPR lover prone to apologizing for his
cis-gender white male privilege and a former Mossad agent with a
thick "Israeli" accent and very permissive feelings about gun
control. Though I'm plenty skeptical about how oblivious you'd have
to be in order to be proximate to these characters and not notice
their rubbery artificiality, I'm not skeptical of Cohen's gifts as a
sketch comic. Each of the characters arrives accompanied by an
initial wave of amusement and several are good for a couple
chuckles. Not one of the characters gets better with additional
screen time and not one of the characters gets funnier based on
spontaneous interaction with Cohen's targets. I laughed several
times at Who Is America? and each of my laughs was based on
something carefully scripted either that Cohen did or that he got a
subject to read.

Showtime would like as few details about the series revealed as
possible and to keep them restricted to the first episode, that
starts with the right-wing conspiracy theorist talking to Bernie
Sanders. The white-haired paragon of the far left sets what will be
a template for Cohen's early approach, which is intent on getting
liberals to fight with him until they get frustrated enough to give
up and conservatives to eagerly join him and follow him over a
cliff. I guess that approach also should also hint at the answer to
the show's titular query.

Though Sanders is the biggest name in the first episode, his segment
stops well before either he or Cohen do anything interesting. The
premiere's showcase segment finds the Mossad character rounding up
gun rights activists for an advertising campaign and it's absolutely
outrageous, or at least it's absolutely outrageous if you've never
seen Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League or
radio/Twitter troll (and former congressman) Joe Walsh in the news
previously. If those gentlemen or Dana Rohrabacher or Larry Pratt or
Matt Gaetz have been at all on your radar, you'll know why all of
the outrage directed at the show thus far as been about how Cohen
got them to be on camera at all and not what he got them to say or
do.

There's at least one probable exception in the second episode, but I
can't tell you who he/she is or what they do other than to say that
they'll only be embarrassed by what they do and not any of the words
out of their mouth — words that are indistinguishable from on-the-
record statements they make happily.

I also can't tell you about the closing segment of the second
episode, why it was so woefully unfunny and how it's such a perfect
illustration of why Cohen's approach only works when he's punching
up and becomes infuriatingly bullying when he's punching down.

So, who is America?

America is irreparably polarized and diminished, prone in certain
corners (on both sides of the aisle) to being vapid and easily
misled. It's a truth nobody was really hiding or denying. I'm
confused by the identity of people who would find these observations
perceptive or revelatory, and yet I'm equally confident that there
are viewers who will be blown away by Sacha Baron Cohen's latest.


--
"The sky was low and heavy, like the brow of a retarded child."