Summary
Cheap, thoughtless and profoundly unfunny, the only positive quality of Buckle Up is that it’s a mercifully short experience.
Perhaps I’m just uncultured, but Buckle Up might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
Most resembling a dopey, aggravating YouTube skit rather than a proper television show, the only mercy offered by Buckle Up is that the entire first season runs for about 20 minutes. And thank f**k for that.
Yet here we find ourselves, on Amazon Prime no less. I have no idea how series writer and creator Andy Silverman managed that feat, but what do I know? Then again, I have no clue what possessed him to come up with the idea for Buckle Up in the first place, so perhaps I’m not best-positioned to judge.
That idea, by the way, is a start-up rideshare service, Axxle, where Finn (Nick Paul White), a driver who has been consistently fired from other, similar companies, uses a puppet pig (voiced by Robert H. Lambert) to mouth off at his various passengers.
Across six 3-ish-minute episodes, the pig torments everyone from an ER nurse to the CEO of a multimillion dollar chemical company to a nun, but most of all me, who sat through the whole thing with a permanent look of faint disgust, rolling my eyes every time the pig emerged through the cheap-looking curtains between the front of the car and the back.
I have no idea if the passengers in Buckle Up are played by real actors, which isn’t to say that they’re so convincing you can’t tell – it’s to say that they’re so appalling that they could quite easily be people pulled straight off the street. The pig’s jokes are reliably terrible; obvious, mostly profession-related gags, none of which are remotely funny, and on occasion it can’t be bothered even with that, descending into repeating the same s**t over and over or making irritating noises or both.
I must admit I’ve never understood the idea of relentless annoyance as a form of humour – it’s just annoying. And Buckle Up is very annoying, which, aside from how cheap the whole thing looks, is really the only noteworthy thing about it.
