Tom Segura, stand-up comedian? That guys’s a Netflix star. Tom Segura, podcaster? Also doing boffo business whether he’s co-hosting pods with his wife Christina P. or his comic foil, Bert Kresicher. But Tom Segura, actor and sketch comedian? That’s a bit of an unknown quality. Until now. His mother hated the first episode of his new Netflix sketch series. But what does she know?
Opening Shot: After the opening title sequence, we get a drone shot over the U.S. Capitol to set the scene for the first sketch.
The Gist: The opening sketch stars Segura as Agent Six, sent to Havana by a federal officer (played by Shea Whigham!) to carry out an assassination. But everything goes dreadfully wrong. First he accidentally shoots and kills a waitress, going against his agent code of “no women, no children.” He panics immediately. Upon uttering his next code “never loose your cool,” right on cue he soils himself. Loudly. We then watch as he drops trou, removing his pants and his underwear and roaming the streets of Havana, all while pretending on his comms that everything’s OK, then dropping that pretense to offer his boss sexual favors to forget it all happened. Unbeknownest to him, Whigham’s character and several others could see and hear all of it. Agent Six cannot even end his own career or life, it turns out.
We then get a mini-monologue about jobs, where Segura walks past vignettes depicting various jobs, while describing his own this way: “You know that dumb shit you get sent to HR for saying? I get paid for that.” After dressing down his assistant, Segura adds: “I may be a lowly comedian but it’s a job I take very seriously.”
There’s a film parody (denoted as A25 instead of A24) about an Italian janitor in a nursing home who’s lifting everyone’s spirits. The catch? He does so by having the elderly patients…lick his ass?!? His boss, Mr. Fletcher (Dan Stevens) is incredulous, but it seems to be heading toward a happy ending until an impossible revelation makes Segura’s Massimo character run for an Uber.
The episode’s final sketch, set in an office meeting, has Segura as Cyrus from IT off to the side sporting a virtual reality headset, presumably working on resetting the company’s servers, although to the consternation of his co-worker Evan (Robert Iler), everything he’s miming makes it look like he’s participating in interactive porn?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of: Think I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, but almost exclusively focused on gross-out gags. It’s a much different kind of cringe.
Our Take: The trailer makes the whole season seem much more ambitious than what we see in the first 17-minute episode. Which is a shame, because the only people who’ll continue to the other episodes are viewers in it for the crass, juvenile, shock value.
His mom was right. In a promo released for Mother’s Day, Segura screened this show for his mother, and she hated it.
“No, Tommy. That’s not funny. This is so disgusting. I am beyond vomit,” she says, adding later: “You can be a good comedian without being that disgusting…This is an insult to humanity!”
Segura pushes back that sharing his intrusive thoughts are the point of the series.
Alas, this isn’t nearly as probing or laugh-out-loud funny as Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” sketches on Saturday Night Live that Segura’s generation grew up on. Instead, his thoughts are shallow and ugly. Sometimes they’re afterthoughts. The second episode devotes a full parody to Steven Seagal. It’s neither nostalgic nor revealing.
Sex and Skin: Segura shows his ass in the first sketch, and there’s suggestive sex in other sketches.
Parting Shot: Segura’s character, Cyrus from IT, turns from a frown to a smirk as he looks at the remnants of an office cake to see the words TO BE CONTINUED underneath the crumbs.
Sleeper Star: Segura got three famous co-stars to play straight men against him in the first episode: Shea Whigham, Dan Stevens and Robert Iler. But only Iler (best known for his child-star portrayal of A.J. Soprano in The Sopranos) gets much to work with in his scene in the episode’s closer as Cyrus’s co-worker who seemingly gets the better of Cyrus in the end.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Netflix may be lauded for allowing their star comedians to branch out into other areas outside stand-up (see John Mulaney’s talk show, Ali Wong’s award-winning limited series), but this series doesn’t measure up. You don’t have to be Segura’s mom to see that.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.