Review: B.J. Novak’s The Premise Trips Over Its Eagerness to Say Something Important

B.J. Novak's The Premise seems self-consciously engineered for profundity and stark provocation.

The Premise
Photo: Alyssa Moran/FX

The trailer for B.J. Novak’s The Premise pegs the dramedy as an “anthology of now,” a direct engagement with persistent societal issues. But where shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone fold their social commentary into stories about technology run amok or the generally strange and surreal, The Premise positions such commentary as its driving force, sometimes tripping over its visible eagerness to say something of importance.

One episode, “Moment of Silence,” revolves around an unstable man (Jon Bernthal) who tests the limits of open-carry laws in his office at the National Gun Lobby (a fictional stand-in for the NRA), while another, “Social Justice Sex Tape” follows a lawyer (Ayo Edebiri) who must convince a witness (Ben Platt) to enter his sex tape into evidence in order to prove that the police are lying about an assault charge against a black man (Jermaine Fowler). The show’s stories are neatly distilled to a “What If” study of sorts, such as: What if the only way you could exonerate someone is to expose some of your most deeply private materials?

Consistent with its intention to be as of-the-moment as possible, the characters go out of their way to demonstrate their mindfulness of things like mental health and racial injustice, frequently using modern buzzwords like “self-care” but either failing to change their behavior or twist the terms to their own ends. When the witness in “Social Justice Sex Tape” expresses concern that revealing his sex tape will “trigger” his partner (who is totally fine with the whole process), it’s an unconvincing cover for the obvious fact that he’s having second thoughts about presenting it to the jury. In another episode, “The Commenter,” a woman (Soko) speculates that a troll in her girlfriend’s (Lola Kirke) Instagram comments is an overweight basement-dweller, hastily adding “sorry to fat-shame” and “sorry to income-shame.”

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The Premise seems self-consciously engineered for profundity and stark provocation, but co-writer and creator Novak, who directed two of the five episodes provided to press, manages to avoid the sense that he’s talking down to the audience. Though every episode makes conspicuous space for straightforward speechifying, these moments tend to feel plausibly natural within each narrative, occurring in scenes like a brainstorm session with the boss in “Moment of Silence” or a question answered in class in “The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler.”

Several episodes become scattershot in their eagerness to hit as many targets as possible. “The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler,” in which a dopey pop star (Lucas Hedges) offers sex to whomever becomes class valedictorian at his former high school, follows bizarre tangents about his religious beliefs, while “Social Justice Sex Tape” goes absolutely nowhere with the point that it raises about how modern technology like deep-fakes invites skepticism of the truth.

Some of these shortcomings can be blamed on too much ambition being crammed into a half-hour time slot, but it’s easy to see where The Premise could have course corrected. Indeed, the weaker episodes strain to incorporate the viewpoints of multiple characters when they could have just centered whichever asshole, usually some white dude, the story is clearly more interested in. “Social Justice Sex Tape” wants to observe the humiliation of Platt’s character but homes in on the underwritten black lawyers instead, while “The Ballad of Jesse Wheeler” gives only cursory space to a smart Asian (Grace Song) who valiantly recuses herself from the race for the best grades, as well as to an exasperated manager played by O’Shea Jackson Jr.

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The Premise would do better to simply commit to its white-centric myopia rather than occasionally and clumsily gesturing toward peripheral people of color. Though the series shows some insight into the hypocrisy of its subjects, it seems oblivious to its flattening of marginalized characters into little more than bystanders to some white person’s mess.

Score: 
 Cast: B.J. Novak, Ayo Edebiri, Ben Platt, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jon Bernthal, Boyd Holbrook, Lucas Hedges, Kaitlyn Dever, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Lola Kirke, Soko, Eric Lange, Daniel Dae Kim  Network: FX

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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