This has been driving me completely nuts for a while because I have seen no-one on this earth talk about Tom Segura’s big Netflix sketch comedy show Bad Thoughts. Not a single viral short video clip, not a single meme/joke repeated, nothing. And here it is nominated for an Emmy! Here it is confirmed for a second season! What the fuck is going on!
Bad Thoughts is maybe one of the slickest sketch shows I have ever watched. The production values are out of this world, the directing is universally good, the acting and performances are also super high quality - Tom Segura is honestly a pleasant surprise on-screen, and he doesn’t feel out-of-place beside guest stars Dan Stevens, Arturo Castro, Daniella Pineda, Robert Iller, Rachel Bloom there’s SO MANY GUESTS. My god there’s so many guests for a six episode run! Too many! It’s an extremely high quality show for your eyeballs, packed with cool people.
Which is a shame because everything else falls super flat. Bad Thoughts is an expensive exercise in barely functional pastiche that doesn’t seek to use its inflated budget to do or say anything at all. Every single sketch drags on forever, repeatedly committing the sin of not knowing whether or not it wants to tell a joke or a story and settling for an unpleasant middle ground where I’m neither laughing nor engaged. For how tight the production is, so many of these shorts get dragged into this black hole of non-sequiturs where the narrative structure is taken out back and shot again and again and again for the sake of throwaway laughs that just don’t matter and don't land.
Take, for example, the first sketch - the marquee sketch - a suave professional assassin (Six) who lives by a strict code takes on a target in Cuba. He attempts to take out his target (a very Blofeld-looking figure) and, as he pulls the trigger, a woman steps in front of his shot and dies in a (delayed) explosion of blood, breaking his code and sending Six into a crisis. His handler calls him immediately after this mishap asking if the job is done, to which our pro replies yup he definitely killed her, dissembling and gaslighting his way through having killed the wrong person.
“Target was a man.” “No it wasn’t… target was a blonde woman. So what… are you saying it was a man? Well I’m not going to assume their pronouns - it’s a female-presenting person.”
Six insists that it was his handler who sent the wrong photo. Don’t know what to tell you man, I hit the right target not my fault etc. etc. etc. Our professional assassin’s super cool and measured narration tries to wrest back control of the situation, changing his code from ‘no woman or children’ to just ‘no children’ and adding ‘never lose your cool’. He then shits himself. To avoid embarrassment, he waddles through the streets trying to sweet talk his handler by offering to blow him, describing exactly how in excruciating detail.
Uh oh! If you thought it couldn’t get worse, back at Quantico or wherever he was on speaker phone the whole time!
Half naked in an alleyway attempting to put a large gun in his mouth, the suave narration comes back, frankly telling the audience that in his line of work there are really no rules apart from ‘no killing children’, which he admits is a pretty good ‘un.
You wouldn’t believe what happens next!
It’s just not very funny, unfortunately, and this is pretty much the template for most of the sketches in the show. Wait a minute, online frog blog, I thought the idea of Tom Segura describing sex acts at-length and in-detail was hysterical, you might be saying.
If so, I’m genuinely glad. You’ll love the whole series. Sometimes he even gets other actors to deliver this exact bit.
I think “assassin hits the wrong target, and now I’m gonna gaslight my way out of this” is a genuinely funny premise (many of the premises in the show are!), so my question would be why did Bad Thoughts feel the need to stack other jokes on top of it? Does shitting yourself (which does just come across as XD CUBAN FOOD AM I RIGHT? NO BURGER!! CUBAN FOOD XDDDD) add to this?
Does moving from denial (I didn’t kill the wrong target) to anger (I’ve shit myself) to bargaining (I will suck you off if you make sure no one finds out) really… add to an arc here? Are we escalating the situation or are we kind of just moving aimlessly around, hoping that something lands with a crowd of people who are mid-sketch tweeting “Oh I can’t believe Tom said that, how’d he even come up with something that twisted!!”.
If this is also reminding you of the David Fincher film The Killer then I think you’d be in the right ballpark? It’s sort of a spy-y thing - honestly it could be a parody of anything in the spy/assassin thriller genre - but it feels like someone watched the trailer for The Killer, decided it was stupid, and then stumbled into mostly recreating stuff already addressed in The Killer? Really odd feeling, sorta like watching Scream and then watching Scary Movie, if you know what I mean?
Fincher's The Killer is pretty good, but...
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| John Woo's The Killer is maybe a like... top 5/top 10 action film. It's excellent. |
This brings me to Bad Thoughts' biggest issues - the first being just how self-aggrandising it is, like… more than any individual sketch issue lies the onanism underpinning the whole thing. Topic Tom introduces the ‘theme’ with a wry smile, then a big ol’ sketch takes place with a million special effects where Actor Tom gets to have a sex scene, while Tom Tom (the version of Tom Segura on the show who is also Tom Segura) gets to be the most long-suffering guy in the room, burdened by the massive weight of his life and his comedy. At no point is Tom Segura ever really vulnerable in the performance or the writing, which covers the show with a patina of insufferable smugness.
This feeling is compounded again and again in the second huge problem, which is that every sketch feels vaguely targeted at this ethereal 'something else', with the exception of the Steven Seagal bit. The country singer sketch is sort of aimed at celebrities exactly like Joe Rogan (who briefly guest stars as himself) but it also isn’t; how frustrating is it when someone gets your coffee order wrong folks, but also it’s so silly to get frustrated; I should be able to say whatever I want in my comedy and you should feel free to level criticism at me, but you also shouldn’t. I'll bring it back to the Steven Seagal sketch again, which hits out at ol' Steven directly but doesn't seem to ever understand what about the man is contemptible or what about his late-career films are particularly worth making fun of. It ends up feeling prescriptive and forced, comedy by way of committee completely bereft of any individual flare or unique angle.
When you step into Bad Thoughts you get to be coddled and comforted because no joke or sketch ever needs to be an actual observation, or end up at too sharp a conclusion, represent too concrete of an idea, or be in any way difficult to digest - it just needs to be nice to watch. The more I break it down the more infuriated I get, like what is Tom Segura angry about here? What does he care about? What is he trying to communicate? Do I need to watch his stand up specials to figure out what's supposed to be going on in the sketches?
This is definitely the end of the review, but I'm all hot under the collar now. TL;DR bad show, real rubbish.
Like it’s completely aimless the whole time, Oscar bait feel-good films are bad so we came up with the delightful tale of an Italian caregiver who heals the elderly through sex acts described in detail? Like I’m all for letting your inner twelve year old pick up an expensive camera, fly to an exotic location with a tonne of props, and direct a James Bond film, but you shouldn’t let him write the jokes as well, right? Right?
Anyway, Bad Thoughts is available to watch on Netflix. I won't provide a link, pay me etc. etc. etc.
See, I was a good boy, I didn’t even mention the premise. Ooooh a comedian has got thoughts too daring and transgressive for the regular population who are tooooooo pre-occupied with ‘enjoying life’ and ‘going normal mode’ how can we possibly comprehend the depths of this sick and twisted labyrinth. Imagine being rich and unhappy - you couldn’t, but as a comedian who ponders these things I find myself masticating this philosophical conundrum like a fine nougat. Fuck off!
