Summary
Bad Influencer is funny more than anything else, at least in “Welcome to the Real Joburg”, but there’s also real drama lurking just below the surface.
An argument about whether something is real or fake is a profoundly ironic one when an influencer is involved. What difference does it make if your designer handbag is authentic if your entire life is predicated on projecting a carefully cultivated version of yourself to the world? Netflix’s Bad Influence at the very least seems to understand this irony. In Episode 1, “Welcome to the Real Joburg”, the point isn’t that the all-pink influencer is rocking a fake Louis Vuitton bag; it’s that the seemingly well-to-do woman exposing the fact isn’t all she appears to be either.
BK is a struggling single mother trying to make ends meet by manufacturing her own fake designer handbags and selling them to unsuspecting wealthy women who are hopefully too focused on status to ask too many questions. So, she’d be the one to spot a fake. She’s in debt to loan sharks and trying to do the best she can for her space-obsessed son, Leo, which includes selling handbags she has made herself through a contact called Thandiwe. Predictably, this goes wrong immediately, leaving BK without any products, blackballed by Thandiwe’s upper-class inner circle, and on the cusp of being killed for what she owes.
For this reason, the clueless influencer BK called out in the opening becomes a business opportunity. This is Pinky, and she’s not in the best of circumstances either. Being called out for the fake bag led her to blow up her “relationship” with Mandla, a wealthy married man who was also funding her entire life. Since her social media stardom is contingent on being able to show off designer gear that she can’t afford on her own, BK’s offer of supplying a feasibly infinite number of homemade designer handbags indistinguishable from the real thing is tempting. All she has to do is sell them.
And thus we have our hook. Bad Influencer Episode 1 lives in the mismatched energy of BK and Pinky as they both step tentatively into each other’s world. BK can scarcely tolerate influencer culture, a parade of facile parties and photoshoots where everyone is organized by their follower count and only interested in what people are wearing, and Pinky is horrified that BK is running a tailor’s in the back of a pawn shop. The fish-out-of-water comedy works in both directions, and the chemistry is immediate, helped along by the fact that “Welcome to the Real Joburg” contrives a string of increasingly ridiculous circumstances to test the dynamic. Pinky takes BK to a party. They book a hotel room for a sexy photo shoot to sell a fake Birkin. Pinky takes BK’s advance and spends it on a night out. BK finds Pinky in the club and steals her phone, threatening to post her compromising photo reel on Instagram.
For the most part, all this is pretty funny, but it’s given a frisson of danger thanks to the very real threat of Joyce and Bheki, the loan sharks that BK is in deep with — and deeper still when she has to borrow even more money to fund Pinky’s photoshoot. As we approach the end of the episode, the comedic theatrics give way a little bit to a more pressing sense of drama. BK is able to sell the fake bag through Pinky’s Instagram at a profit, but Bheki takes the proceeds as interest. He also clearly sees an opportunity in the pair of them himself, especially after Pinky gives away that BK is supplying the fakes.
You can see where it’s going, obviously, but there’s more than enough personality to get Bad Influencer there, and it benefits from its own sense of self-awareness. It even ends with an unexpected cliffhanger. Earlier, BK had met Themba, a man running a private class about the cosmos that Leo was attending. There was an immediate romantic spark between the two of them, but it turns out that Themba is the captain of the police’s Counterfeit and Organized Crime Unit. If BK’s plan to keep selling the handbags is a success, she might end up sleeping with the enemy without even realising it.
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