It's the first full episode of anything, ever, I watched on my phone. Hungover, lying sideways in bed, at 1PM on a Monday, after stumbling onto the Instagram account which led me to the HBO Youtube page that had put up the entire 30 minute episode for free. I felt like I had de-aged at least five years.


Haven't seen the second episode yet, plan to tomorrow, but I will say I was fascinated by just about everything in the first episode. The only thing I was let down by was that the Ripa sketch was the primary piece of the episode, but I understood the design behind it. I'm a hetero white male feeling uncomfortable and bored watching an extended riff on a children's sketch show in which Death comes early and often for black children, and both herself and the camera are exhausted by the effort and desperate to escape but cannot; just when the show thinks it's ready to move on, it doesn't, and just when Death thinks she can quit, she realizes she can't.


That was powerful, but it took reflection to find that. The actual sketch felt like it wasn't taking it there for everyone, but I did see a few reactions point to it as the highlight of the episode (if not for those specific reasons) so maybe I'm wrong.

My favorite moment was when the Jon Hamm sketch - which was a nice surprise, a bit obvious, and very well put together - got interrupted by a text message during the editing process. I loved how they shot that segment and how dramatically the tone of the show changed afterward. That more than anything made me excited for the next five episodes.

I also thought it was an interesting choice to turn the black bisexual segment into a claymation cartoon, but I loved Gumby as a kid and the aesthetic of the story, so I was able to shake off my worry that people might see that as a continuing otherization of that culture, albeit probably unintentionally.

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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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