What You Should Know About The Premise On FX & HULU
The Premise Premiers Tomorrow but Inspires Conversation Today
BJ Novak's new series The Premise premieres on Hulu tomorrow, and we can't wait to dive into this series. The FX show is an anthology series that is intended to use a Novak-ian flare of comedy and drama to discuss major social issues of the modern day. The trailer for the series can be seen here.
Novak is known for trying to test the boundaries.
Back 2009 he directed the Scott's Tots episode of The Office where Michael Scott promised a class of mostly Black third-graders he'd pay for their college tuition if they graduated high school. The kids excelled and became to be known as Scott's Tots. The episode takes a hilariously dark turn when he has to inform them he isn't paying for their education.
Critics have strong feelings about the show.
Already, there are many contradictory opinions about the show. The Daily Beast praised the show saying, "The Premise finds a cohesive through-line in our collective need for intimacy and care in a social hierarchy dominated by the internet, where we are both more connected and more isolated than ever." After spending his early career on and writing for The Office, a show, at it's heart, about human connection and intricacies, The premise of The Premise sounds like an easy homerun for BJ Novak.
Others, however, have not been so keen on the show. Rolling Stone critiqued the agenda-driven monologues that apparently recur throughout the show saying, "Those more didactic passages tend to feel clumsily inserted in a way that breaks the spell of the story being told, making each person in them more palpably a symbol rather than a character." It is tricky, as was also pointed out by rolling stone, to maintain a consistent theme though an anthology series which may explain the potentially forced dialogue. I know one thing for sure is that the point of art is to make you feel. Good or bad, it seems like BJ has done that.
Top Quality Actors
The show features a star studded cast including Ben Platt, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kaitlyn Dever, Daniel Dae Kim, Jon Bernthal, O'Shea Jackson Jr. and others. With such a powerhouse team, including Novak himeself, I am hardpressed to believe the show does not at least partially impress.
I, however, will not be making judgements either way until the show officially premiers.
Balancing Acts
The first episode of the season, Social Justice Sex Tape, airs tomorrow-- the title already promising to push the envelope to a point at which I cannot Google it on my work computer. Episode is about gun violence and the gun lobby, episode for is about internet trolls and episode 5 might as well be called Voldemort because I'm not even going to type it. The show is going to have to walk a fine line balancing such heavy topic with comedic tones.
So that's what you should know before watching The Premise tomorrow. I'll be watching will you?
