Listen, we get it: Men can be jerks a lot. And the fact that they’re jerks is good fodder for comedy. But when the four main characters in a comedy are so jerky they don’t realize how idiotic they are, a show goes from funny to annoying, as a new French series on Netflix demonstrates.
SHAFTED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A group of men sit in a circle, and one of them says, “Hi, my name is Raphael, and I’m an alpha male.”
The Gist: Four friends — Tom (Manu Payet), Cédric (Guillaume Labbé), Tonio (Vincent Heneine) and Jérémie (Antoine Gouy) — are in that group, but not all of them are willing to admit that they’re alpha males. In fact, their presence in that group has been mandated by a court of law.
Flash back two months, and we see Cédric getting ready to go to work as an advertising executive. When he gets to his spacious office, his boss comes in and tells him that he will be splitting his director position with Mischa (Luana Duchemin), an excutive Cédric has so little respect for that he still considers her his intern. He thinks this is discrimination against white males, and threatens to leave. His boss doesn’t seem to stop him when he walks out the door and quits.
Tom is a cartoonist who is having a creative block since he separated from his wife Andrea (Alysson Paradis). He still thinks they’ll get back together, but his buddies think she’s a holy terror. Jérém, a city bicycle cop, longs to be a national mounted cop; his wife Cecile (Ariane Mourier) wants to move, but their credit stinks. On the advice of Tonio’s girlfriend Delphine (Mélanie Bernier), Cecile tries to spice things up in the bedroom, but with kids in the house, that’s nearly impossible.
Tonio wants to marry Delphine, and he tells his irregular side affair that he means it this time. But when the time comes, Delphine proposes that they open things up. In the meantime, Cédric tries to curb the free-spending ways of his girlfriend Lena (Olga Kurylenko) and his teenage daughter without telling them he quit his job.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Perhaps Men Of A Certain Age, except for the fact that the men in Shafted (original title: Super Males) are unrepentant a-holes.
Our Take: If it was the goal of Shafted writers Julien Teisseire and Estelle Koenig to make the four guys at the center of their show look like idiots, they are definitely on the right track in the first episode. In all of their own ways, each of the friends thinks they rule the roost in their families, even if reality indicates otherwise.
The idea of this show is that the reality is that these guys are the dying remnants of a patriarchy that is being dismantled piece by piece, but we’re not sure if it comes off that way. Sure, the women in their lives all have the upper hand on them, but that may just be because they’re all insensitive narciccists and not just because they’re men.
Tom is the most pathetic of the four, wandering around his divorcee flat without pants or underwear and moping to his teenage son about getting back together with Andrea. He also gets upset when he sees her on the Instagram feed of their family dentist, with the both of them seeimingly in romantic bliss. So, despite being mopey and pathetic, he thinks he still has a chance to get back with Andrea. To us, that’s being as big of a jerk as the arrogant Cédric or the can’t-keep-it-in-his-pants Tonio.
So what it comes down to is whether we want to spend time with these guys. After the first episode, the answer to that is an emphatic “hell no.”
Sex and Skin: Lots of naked butts, and Jérém and Cecile have issues using a remote-controled vibrator.
Parting Shot: As Tom drunkenly smashes the car of his wife’s new beau, the other three friends try to stop them, then run when a police car arrives.
Sleeper Star: We thought Mélanie Bernier’s character Delphine was the most real-seeming character of the group.
Most Pilot-y Line: Cédric’s boss calls Mischa’s new position “Directress,” which is actually more insulting that just saying she’s a director.
Our Call: SKIP IT. The main characters in Shafted are so cartoonishly buffoonish that we have no desire to watch them constantly get in their own way.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shafted’ On Netflix, About A Group Of Friends Who Are Forced To Admit They’re Alpha Males appeared first on Decider.
