There are no green people on your list. Once Max was a respected physicist, but once obsessed with conspiracy theory, was shamefully expelled from the university, and now works as a salesman in a bookstore, where he scares customers with stories that the world has long been ruled by aliens.
And on the other side of the city sits pants as a security guard of the mall fat African-American Leroy, whose brilliant career as a police officer is also long over.
Unexpectedly for themselves, the couple will find themselves in the service of a top-secret organization studying paranormal phenomena.
So begins a new comedy series from Fox Studios. The main thing here is the word “comedy”. The project was conceived as a parody of the television subculture of "serious films about the unknown." The shooters here, of course, were the X-Files. Few people now remember that the premiere of this series was accompanied by a grandiose advertising campaign with the involvement of scientists who said that “absolutely everything shown in the series is the holy truth.” Some people still believe it, by the way.
But ridiculing conspiracy theories and movies about secret laboratories where flying saucers are hidden is a difficult task. And the series clearly demonstrates this. This is not the most fertile material for humor, so jokes in the series, let’s say, leave much to be desired. You seem to understand that it must be funny, but somehow it does not break through.
The difficulty is in the very object of ridicule. What or who to laugh at? People who believe in aliens? But the series is trying to convince us of their existence. To mock those who deny alien civilizations? Such humor is difficult to relate to reality, in which we have not yet received evidence of the existence of other worlds.
When the characters get into the office of the top secret service, the filmmakers 10 times in 5 minutes manage to play the same joke:
You are in a very secret place. And we won't tell you what we're doing here. I don't care. You got it anyway. Yeah, we catch aliens. But we won’t tell you anything else... I don't care, though. Ask questions. Let me tell you.
The main advantage of the series is the heroes themselves. They carry the main comic load. It turns out that Max, who has dreamed of meeting an alien civilization for many years, is not really ready for such an event. When he sees the green men, it will end in a nervous breakdown. And Leroy, in general, is sure that everything that happens to him is a prank, and he got into the show “Hidden Camera”.
In general, the feeling of watching the first series is that the authors managed to beat all the stamps inherent in “paranormal” films in 20 minutes, and therefore it is not quite clear what to show next.
Perhaps they will mock individual genres (parody horrors, thrillers) or specific films (from Spielberg's "E.T." to "Men in Black"). That would be a great option.
Personally, the author of these lines had the feeling that we were shown just a slightly drawn-out sketch from a humorous show. It is difficult to imagine this story as a full-fledged series.
The rest is worth noting a decent budget and good special effects.
5 out of 10
