I Watch TV: Miracle Workers: End Times

 

Miracle Workers: End Times

Miracle Workers has come to an end with the perhaps apt season End Times, parodying post-apocalyptic films. In the wastelands Sid (Daniel Radcliffe) meets warlord Freya Exaltada (Gerladine Viswanathan); they fall in love, marry and decide to settle down in Boomtown (which turns out not to be the last, or even best, or even most normal settlement). Sid gets a job with the Junkman (Steve Buscemi), swiftly and accidentally becoming his favourite employee. For some reason the currency is birdbeaks.

We get a couple of the usual sitcom plots of the sort where the boss (the Junkman) has a terrible idea and the employee (Sid) has to put it into practice. These being Mad Max or more esoteric post-apocalyptic themed does add to the amusement. The Junkman lives in a pre-Apocalypse (before the “Boom”) McMansion, which is an old fast food restaurant, with his hologram wife.

More interesting are the storylines where Freya has to deal with settling down. She has a war dog Scraps (Jon Bass) dressed in leather straps. Initially he’s very dog-in-human-form, but as the series progresses adds more character, though he’s still dog-like. She also has a friend Tai (TI-90) a Terminator clone. He wants to party hard like before she got married (before she got a bit older).

Some of the jokes are very on the nose (Sid and Freya having problems in their marriage they try a virtual reality called the MatriXXX for sex and stuff). Sometimes it gets very esoteric, with a play of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective that inevitably takes control of leading actor, or the Junkman’s high school reunion where he meets his old sweetheart and bully, though they’re all skeletons thanks to the Boom. Kind of scattershot, bringing in all kinds of post-apocalyptic fiction, then mundanifying them.

Watch This: Funny, high concept comedy sometimes reaching for insight
Don’t Watch This: The insight is future barbarians misunderstand modern society to cast light on it