AMERICAN VANDAL cancelled by Netflix

In surprising news, Netflix have cancelled their true-crime mockumentary, American Vandal, after two seasons.

American Vandal debuted in 2017 with a story revolving around a high school student expelled after allegedly vandalising twenty-seven cars in the school parking lot. Another student realises he could not have committed the crime and sets out to clear his name through a Serial/Making a Murderer-style expose. The show became a sleeper hit and did good business for Netflix, as well as attracting surprising levels of critical acclaim, especially for the character depth the show achieved despite its goofy premise.

Season 2 aired last month on Netflix and also attracted critical acclaim, despite the premise (a laxative prank on a school with explosive results) being considerably more gross than the first season. Netflix do not release viewing figures, so it is unclear how well the show did (especially given the more unpleasant premise), but certainly the buzz it generated was notable.

However, Netflix also seem to be clearing house on shows made by outside production companies in favour of original material: it recently cancelled the Marvel/ABC-produced Iron Fist and Luke Cage despite an apparently reasonable level of success with both. American Vandal is made by an outside production company, with Netflix preferring to bring more shows inhouse (especially given its two original big hits, House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, are ending shortly). American Vandal also gained critical praise at the expense of Netflix Original 13 Reasons Why, particularly for its more realistic depiction of teenage life.

This does mean that American Vandal could be saved and moved to another service: reportedly other streaming services - likely Amazon Prime Video and Hulu - are interested in picking up the show. More news as we get it.

American Vandal: Season 2

In 2016, high school student Dylan Maxwell was expelled from his school in Oceanside, California for drawing genitalia on twenty-seven staff cars. Amateur film-makers Peter Maldonado and Sam Eckland proved his innocence through a thorough video investigation, although they unearthed a lot of secrets about their school, friends and teachers in the process.

Eighteen months later, having been made famous through the Netflix series based on their exploits, Peter and Sam are back. A devastating prank known as the "Brownout" has taken place at St. Bernadine Catholic School in Bellevue, Washington. A student, Kevin McClain, has been found guilty and expelled, but his friend Chloe believes he was coerced into giving a false confession. Peter and Sam are soon on the case, and finding new secrets in a new school.

American Vandal's debut season was one of the unexpected highlights of 2017, a show with a juvenile premise (a guy spray-painting phallic imagery on cars) which quite unexpectedly turned into an insightful analysis of life in the modern American high school, with cliques, the popular kids, the ignored ones and the posers, all brought together by the power of social media.

The second season is, even more unexpectedly, better. The investigation is more serious, more epic and more involved: there are actually three crimes and the criminal remains at large, even taunting Peter and Sam through Instagram as the trail grows colder and warmer. In the first season Peter and Sam were part of the story (and, briefly, suspects), insiders who knew everyone involved. In the second season they are minor celebrities but outsiders who can come into the school with no pre-conceptions, which both helps the investigation (they can consider suspects everyone else immediately rejects) and hinders it (people are less likely to open up to them). This shift in format works quite well and leads to a more interesting investigation.

That said, it's an investigation that opens with a somewhat graphical account of what can only be described as an explosive faecal decompression on a large scale. Getting through the first episode or two may require a strong stomach (and don't repeat my mistake of watching the first episode whilst tucking into a curry) and a relatively high tolerance for toilet humour. Once this is out of the way, however, the story opens up and goes in interesting directions. The finger of guilt moves from Kevin (a great performance by Travis Tope) to basketball star DeMarcus Tillman (an outstanding turn by Melvin Gregg), allowing the show to make some interesting comments on class, race and the insidious nature of sports funding in American high schools, all with a tremendously light touch.

Like the first season, the story starts off as a comedy and moves into more serious areas as it proceeds, upending friendships and brutally exposing the insecurities and secrets of the characters. Unlike the first season, which ended on an ambiguous note with the identity of the graffiti cast only being (strongly) alluded to but not confirmed, the second season has a very definitive resolution, and the crime turns out to be far more elaborate than first though with multiple layers that expand American Vandal from being just about pranks to wider and more serious crimes. This leads the show into a thorough and effective exploration of digital relationships in the modern world. The first season touched on it a bit, but the second season eviscerates it and raises a whole load of interesting, disquieting questions.

But then it comes back to the poop, and as one of the characters says, "Poop is funny." American Vandal is a multi-layered show working on a lot of levels and exploring some serious topics, but always with a laugh a few moments away, whether it's a sharp line of dialogue or a strong visual gag or, indeed, scatological humour. I think a lot of people will pointblank refuse to watch the show because of that lowbrow premise when they would otherwise really enjoy the more serious turn the show takes in the last two episodes, and that's a shame.

For those with stronger constitutions, American Vandal's second season (****½) is an improvement over its already strong-predecessor and uses lowbrow humour as a way of exploring really relevant and interesting modern sociological phenomenons and how it impacts on young people, and in a far more entertaining, subtle and less-exploitative way than shows like 13 Reasons Why. It's a smart and intelligence show, albeit one built on gross foundations. It is available to watch now on Netflix.

American Vandal: Season 1

Oceanside, California. High school student Dylan Maxwell is expelled after twenty-seven cars in the school parking lot are vandalised with phallic images, Dylan's trademark graffiti style. Whilst Dylan usually admits and boasts of his pranks (and even films them for his YouTube channel), in this case he vehemently protests his innocence. Fellow student and budding documentary-maker Peter Maldonado identifies several discrepancies in the account of the crime and, inspired by web series Serial, sets out to prove Maxwell's innocence with a thorough and painstaking examination of the evidence.

American Vandal is a mockumentary which merges the familiar Spinal Tap/What We Do in the Shadows format with the recent emergence of high-profile, true-crime documentaries such as Serial and Making a Murderer. At first glance it's a dumb comedy where the crime isn't a bloody murder but a kid vandalising a few cars for kicks, with a lot of early humour mined from the differing techniques for drawing male genitalia and the use of ludicrously elaborate CGI reconstructions of the crime. However, the show quickly changes tack and moves into a slightly more serious examination of high school, relationships, social media, memes and how decisions made at a young age can affect someone's entire life.

The central conceit is that Maldonado and his friends Sam Ecklund and Gabi Granger are filming a documentary about the crime both as a project and also a way to prove Maxwell's innocence. They don't particularly like Maxwell, but the pedantic Maldonado in particular seems irritated that the biggest problem with the idea that Maxwell committed the crime - that he's dumb as a box of frogs and couldn't possibly blank the security cameras covering the parking lot - doesn't seem to have registered with the teachers who are all too eager to get rid of a known troublemaker. A lot of easy humour is mined from the fact that Maxwell is not a particularly bright guy, but this blows up later on when he sits down to watch the documentary, when it becomes suddenly and searingly painful to watch.

American Vandal is an odd show in tone: it's very funny, with usually several stand-out comedic moments per episode. It's also, bizarrely, quite gripping: the central mystery is mind-bogglingly inane but the reconstructions of the crime, the painstaking character analysis of each person involved and the way new evidence is discovered just as leads seem to be drying up, leading into the next episode, gives the series a strong moreish quality. Most successfully, it's got some very well-written characters, portrayed by some extremely talented young actors. Most successful spoofs have to be as good as the thing they are spoofing, and American Vandal is certainly that.

Weirdly, I was often reminded of the novel and movie Battle Royale whilst watching this show: that story was about a bunch of high school students forced to fight one another to the death on a remote island, but if you ignored the trappings it was really about school relationships, the intensity of youth (when everything is Vitally Important and social status is everything) and how societies remain the same even in wildly different circumstances. American Vandal does the same thing, with its examination of the crime also exposing the social conflicts across the school, amongst both the students and teachers. Relationships, ambitions, hopes and darker secrets emerge over the course of its eight half-hour episodes. The silly banter of the kids and their rather under-developed senses of humour ring true, and the show strikes just the right balance of authenticity; only the hyper-elaborate CGI scenes don't really fit in, although you can perhaps accept them as having been added later after Maldonado's project goes viral and gets picked up by a network.

There are several twists and the final episode is pretty stunning: it inverts some of the places you expect the characters to go and you realise just how good some of these actors really are, especially two of the actresses in supporting roles who out of nowhere deliver powerful, screen-dominating performances when the story intensifies towards the end. Of the two central questions in the series, one is definitely resolved but the other is not (although Maldonado hits on a theory that he feels is "90% convincing" and probably is the answer, but with just enough doubt left behind), which feels appropriate.

American Vandal's first season (****) starts off as a dumb high school comedy mockumentary - American Pie by way of Making a Murderer - but very quickly outgrows that to tell a series of stories about a group of high school students that are alternatively funny, tragic, sweet and dramatic. By the time you get to the end, you could probably care less who "drew the dicks", but you will want to know more about these characters. The show is available now on Netflix. A second season is in the planning stages but has not been commissioned yet.