To us, 1999 wasn’t ancient history. But to others, it was still a time when everyone’s lives weren’t completely online, and you could still do things like, you know, hire actors to play your family so you can visit your estranged, dying father. A new Netflix series from Thailand explores what happens when one man does just that.
Opening Shot: A car drives on a road through a lushly-vegetated hillside.
The Gist: The year is 1999. Four people are in this car, after a long overnight drive from Bangkok to Phang Nga. The four stop on a bridge to make sure they have their stories straight. Pond (Nopachai “Peter” Jayanama) has his ex-girlfriend Lily (Namfon Kullanut) acting as his wife, and Keg (JJ-Krissanapoom Pibulsonggram) and Bung (Primmy-Wipawee Patnasiri) are acting as his grown kids.
All Keg and Bung know is that they’re visiting Pond’s parents, whom Bung hasn’t seen or talked to in about 20 years. Even Lily really doesn’t know why that’s the case — she tells Bung “I was his girlfriend, not his wife”. When they arrive at the hospital where Pond’s father is a patient, they find out that they’re there to say goodbye to this “grandfather” that they’ve never even met.
Bung, for her part, gets overwhelmed by the prospect and walks out. But Keg and Lily follow her to tell her that this is why Pond hired them; there’s a reason why he felt he needed this kind of closure with his father.
We then see how Keg got hired for this gig. During the financial crisis, it was tough finding a job, so he landed one at a pager call center, where he took text messages that people wanted to send to others (remember, this is 1999). He knows people’s secrets because of these messages, and when he hears that a caller needs a young actor and actress for an up-country gig, he takes the word “actor” out of the message and goes to the audition himself.
Lily and Pond are the ones conducting the auditions; Keg is terrible, but when Pond gets a page that his father has taken a turn for the worse, he has no other choice but to hire the teen. Since none of the women who have auditioned seem right, Lily suggests Bung, the tomboyish owner of a local video store. When the three of them go to visit, Bung is romancing her girlfriend with film references. She also seems to be savvy enough to ask for double the fee when Pond tells her they need to leave immediately.
After Pond’s father is taken off the ventilator, the wait for his death starts. They all get to know Pond’s mother; she and Lily bond over the mom’s partying days in the past. Then the entire “family” gets a surprise which ensures that their time together won’t be as short as they thought it would be.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There was a UK and Canadian series called Meet The Family which seems to have a similar premise to Analog Squad.
Our Take: The idea is that Analog Squad is taking place just before Y2K, when we didn’t know whether the world was going to end due to computers thinking it was 1900 instead of 2000, and that people are still communicating “the old fashioned way,” i.e. via payphones and good-old-face-to-face talking. However, that feels like a bit of a smokescreen for what’s essentially a found family story, where these four people posing as a family end up bonding into something resembling a real one.
The series has a fair amount of comedy, most of which is character-based. Director and co-writer Nithiwat “Ton” Tharatorn has a good handle on most of the characters in the first episode, especially Bung and Keg. We find out, for instance, is the son of a former famous nude model who now owns a youth hostel and is trying to make a comeback. Bung is a movie nut whose relationship with her mother seems to be mostly transactional. We don’t know a ton about Lily, but we do know that she seems to care enough about Pond to help him in this charade.
The person we know the least about is Pond and why he was estranged from his family. His mother says something about the Apollo moon missions driving a wedge within the family, but instead of an explanation, we get archival footage of the rocket launch. Perhaps those details are being held back on purpose, but it made for a slightly frustrating watch.
What we do know is that this fake family is going to have to pretend to be real far longer than they all bargained for. There’s more than enough sincere, heartwarming drama in the first episode to know that they’re all going to bond as the season goes on, and seeing them all getting to know each other will be the part of the show we’re looking forward to the most.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Pond’s dad miraculously rallies and regains consciousness. A freaked out Pond says he’s going back to Bangkok. The other three look at each other and wonder just what the heck is next. Then a graphic says “39 Days to 2000.”
Sleeper Star: Primmy-Wipawee Patnasiri is pretty funny as Bung, especially when she gets all lovey-dovey with her girlfriend.
Most Pilot-y Line: The show wants to make us think that things like the internet and cell phones didn’t exist in 1999; even the typeface of the show’s title makes it look like the year was smack in the 8-bit graphics era. Of course, neither was really the case.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We like the found family concept behind Analog Squad. We’re just not sure why the story has to take place when it does.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.