Summary
Bad Thoughts is uneven like all anthologies, but there are far more hits than misses. Segura knows how to push buttons, but there’s a cleverer quality to this collection that shouldn’t be overlooked.
You can always rely on a comedian, especially a relatively edgy one, to push some boundaries. Tom Segura, who’s no stranger to Netflix, does that with Bad Thoughts, a proudly deranged sketch show that puts the streamer’s substantial budget to work on being as out-there and offensive as possible. But there’s a charming and often clever contour to Segura’s brand of shock that isn’t so much trying to truly push buttons as blow sensitive subjects out to their most ridiculous proportions so we can all laugh at them together.
Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes, Segura is admittedly just saying and doing stuff because he knows it’ll annoy or upset people, which is for his amusement more than any audience’s. But Bad Thoughts is rarely like that. Only a couple of the shorts – each of the six themed episodes packs in three, along with some interstitials – feel too easy; the majority are genuinely entertaining and often quite interesting concepts, especially for long-time fans of Segura who can spot callbacks to his old material, his dad’s war stories, or his personal pet peeves.
Many of the shorts are based explicitly around these things. In one, two little people on a plane confront Tom about an offensive old bit, and the idea that he’d rather be doing anything than having that conversation makes for a funny payoff. In another, Tom and his real-life wife, Christina P, attend a highly offensive school play that has been directed by Tom’s father. And in a third, Tom goes on a murderous rampage when disinterested baristas get his coffee order wrong.
But some of the shorts are more experimental. Perhaps my favourite finds Tom in a ridiculous wig cosplaying an Italian immigrant who gets a job in a nursing home for what turn out to be sexually-motivated reasons, and the whole thing’s convincingly filmed to resemble an A24 movie trailer. Another two-parter is in black and white with a classic aspect ratio but contains no jokes at all beyond the incredibly low-brow image of Tom trying to have sex with… well, some things are better left unspoiled. Just know that the juxtaposition here isn’t an accident.
There are plenty of two-parters in Bad Thoughts – most episodes end with the first half of a slightly bigger story that is then concluded at the start of the next outing. This light touch of serialization generally works, so it’s surprising that the format is dropped in time for the final episode, which is the only one to contain two shorts instead of three (to be fair, though, one of them is by far the most memorable). The bigger ideas that require a bit more room to breathe tend to be the better ones, and in that sense, it’s easy to imagine the series as a kind of test bed for ideas that may become their own little recurring storylines if the show proves popular and the format is expanded.
It’s for this reason, I think, that it’s easy not to be provoked by Segura’s obvious attempts to make people uncomfortable, since the comedy isn’t thoughtless, even at its most obvious. It’s all clever enough to be making an underlying related point or to at least understand what’s funny about a particular idea. Even the stuff that’s very surface level – such as a dying woman’s last wish being to have sex with a sandwich salesman, or the idea of a hitman who soils himself – is often enlivened by a certain visual style (as in the latter) or a fun cameo (as in the former).
“Tom Segura does Black Mirror” likely wasn’t on your radar, as it wasn’t on mine, but I think that comparison is probably overselling things. Bad Thoughts feels more like South Park by way of The Twilight Zone, scatological humour attached to a lightly weird premise instead of a truly dystopian hook. Plenty of people won’t like it, especially if they’re not fans of Segura, but that’d probably be true regardless. For everyone else, this is a genuinely funny and sometimes genuinely deranged collection of sketches, and while some are better than others, there are nonetheless many more hits than misses.
