‘Killing It’ Is One of TV’s Most Criminally Overlooked Comedies
In these dark times in which we live, the line between satire and horror can be so razor-thin as to barely exist at all. Peacock’s Craig Robinson comedy Killing It is ostensibly a comedy about how badly the American economic system is stacked against anyone who isn’t already well-off. But its humor is so cutting, and so often feels not that far removed from reality, that I often spend more time covering my face during episodes than laughing.
This is not a complaint, mind you. The series, created by Brooklyn Nine-Nine alums Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici, is almost diabolically clever in the many obstacles it places in front of Robinson’s would-be mogul Craig on his attempted climb to fortune. And it has surrounded its leading man with a marvelous collection of indelibly weird characters, most notably Claudia O’Doherty as Jillian, a pathologically optimistic rideshare driver who spent the first season living inside the billboard she was paid to tow behind her car. But there are certainly moments — like those later Veep seasons that intersected with the Trump administration — where seemingly ridiculous ideas feel painfully close to the reality around us.
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Season One, set in 2016, saw Craig and Jillian teaming up to win a snake-killing contest, so that Craig could use the $20,000 prize to buy a patch of Florida swampland where he could grow saw palmetto berries and become a health supplement mogul. But every seeming step forward instead pulled our heroes at least four steps backward. Craig began the series, for instance, as a bank security guard with a modest apartment and a car, and by midseason was living in a 24-hour gym because the monthly membership fee was all he could afford. There were arson investigations, frequent clashes with would-be YouTube star Brock (Scott MacArthur), and various humiliations. In that season’s most biting episode, Craig pinned all his hopes on a VIP pass at a conference for would-be entrepreneurs where he would pitch his farm idea to a Shark Tank alum. Instead, he realized that the entire event was a scam, run by people who had already climbed the socioeconomic ladder and were not only pulling the rungs up behind them, but getting poor people to pay for the privilege of watching them do it.
The show could be incredibly bleak in its depiction of income inequality — like another episode guest-starring D’Arcy Carden as a capricious rich woman who hires Jillian as a TaskRabbit to pose as her for a day as part of a tax fraud scheme — but the tenacity of the main characters, and the appeal of Robinson and O’Doherty, served as a necessary balance to the sense of hopelessness.
Season Two, which began streaming on Peacock today, finds the duo in seemingly better circumstances. It’s 2017, their farm is up and running, and a health food company is very interested in buying up their entire crop to meet the increased demand for the berries (which can help with nighttime urination and other prostate issues). But in the opening minutes, an attempt to lower a mobile office onto the swamp land results in it lying on its side, and every other move they make winds up similarly askew. Neither of our heroes ever winds up in quite so desperate a circumstance as we saw them in last year, but there are various points where they would clearly be happier — or, at least, safer — in the jobs in which we met them.
There are two key differences between this season and the one before it. The first is that institutional forces are less the enemy this time around than various eccentric characters who want to take advantage of Craig and Jillian. There’s the Boones, a local crime family (led by Dot-Marie Jones, doing her best to channel Mags Bennett from Justified) who want to launder their own ill-gotten berries through Craig’s farm. Craig’s thieving brother Zay (Rell Battle) keeps showing up to put his own interests ahead of his sibling’s, and he’s frequently accompanied by sociopath-cum-mogul Rodney Lamonca (Tim Heidecker) and Rodney’s terrifyingly precocious daughter Prada (Anna Mae Quinn). Government bureaucracy and/or corporate shamelessness are still sometimes at fault — the Boones spend a lot of time fretting about health insurance, for instance — but more often than not, conflicts come from people and circumstances that are extremely specific to this situation.
But if Killing It eases back a bit on the notion that we are all destined to be crushed into fine powder by capitalism’s boot heel, it becomes easier to laugh with in the process. The new season feels more inventive and weird in the many problems that befall Craig and the others. And it does even better work with guest stars this time around. Jackie Earle Haley does a great turn in one episode as a debt collector who seems to operate by vampire rules, while Timothy Simons shines in a multi-episode appearance as an FBI agent who is way too eager to talk about his bisexuality.
And even when the focus is more on particular villains this time around, Killing It never entirely loses sight of the idea that they are only slightly exaggerated versions of the kinds of financial predators who lurk all around us, and that the American dream is a lie we have always told ourselves, but one that rings especially false today.
This is a very sharp, if often deeply uncomfortable comedy. It’s good to have it back.
Season Two of Killing It is now streaming in its entirety on Peacock. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
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