The star of the brutal Comedy Central show talks about the final season and how far the writers are willing to take the dark humor

Andy Daly is trying to think of a situation that would be too cruel to inflict upon Forrest MacNeil, the character he plays on Review, but it’s proving to be a struggle. The comedian laughs, pauses, and laughs again. Finally, after dredging the darkest recesses of his mind, he lands on something.

“There was a notion that at some point in our third season we were going to have his limbs removed,” Daly explains. “Because we were like: ‘This is our final season, so we can do something horrific that changes him permanently and not be married to it for much longer. We could have him lose both of his arms!’”

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Unfortunately, or fortunately for Forrest, a member of Daly’s writing team suggested that, even for Review’s host-cum-punching-bag, amputation might just be a punishment too far. There was the sudden realization that “there is a threshold that wouldn’t be as fun”, says Daly. “There is a limit to how horrible things can get.”

Make no mistake, Daly has subjected Forrest to some pretty horrible things on Review. Over the course of Comedy Central’s hilarious, excruciating series, he has been buried alive, placed in a psychiatric facility, mauled by a tiger, and kicked in the testicles (twice); he has burnt down his father’s house, been lost at sea, and witnessed several deaths, including one at his own hands.

What’s more, many of these hideous circumstances have been brought on by, or practically encouraged by, Forrest himself. In each episode of Review’s show-within-a-show, he sets out to evaluate “life experiences” suggested by members of the public. They range from the minor (eating pancakes) to the profound (founding a cult). Forrest throws himself fully into these endeavours, usually with disastrous results. At the end of the show, he offers them a star rating out of five.

Review was adapted from an Australian series called Review with Myles Barlow, but Daly’s version twists the show’s high-concept premise into a new shape. In the Australian Review, Barlow was something of a social scientist, approaching his reviews with a blank slate and treating them with methodical precision. Right from the outset of Daly’s Review it is clear that Forrest is incapable of such professionalism. “He would start his assignment prejudicing his experience right away by saying ‘Oh, this is going to be fun’, or ‘This is going to be terrible’,” Daly explains.

And while the original Review would cartoonishly wipe the slate clean after each of Barlow’s assignments, no such luxury is afforded to Forrest. The ordeals that he suffers in each episode continue to reverberate long after he’s delivered his star rating. So, “if he divorced his wife in episode three, they were going to stay divorced for the life of the series”, Daly explains.

It’s this sense of accumulation, of trauma building up on Forrest’s back, that pushes Review into such blackly comic territory. Forrest loses his wife and his friends, witnesses a quite unreasonable amount of death and repeatedly scars himself both psychologically and physically. (A shot of Forrest’s torso in the new season shows it pockmarked with bullet wounds, cuts and all manner of other blemishes.) And all of this pain is endured in the service of a TV show about giving entirely redundant star ratings to random suggestions from strangers on the internet. What sort of person would go through so much suffering for such a trivial end result?

Daly thinks the answer lies in Forrest’s life before Review. “We had this idea that he was a movie reviewer who was incapable of staying awake for the entire length of a movie,” Daly says. “It became his fatal flaw as a reviewer. So he failed out of that profession, and was given this opportunity to use his evaluative skills for something more important. This was going to be an opportunity to turn around to those critics who had laughed about him and stuff it in their faces.

“I think he has always had a narcissistic personality, and he’s always been overconfident,” Daly continues. “He’s been a doofus before, but no life experience has given him the opportunity to ruin things with his doofusness to the extent that this show does.”

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What’s remarkable about Forrest is that this disastrous combination of narcissism and idiocy lurks beneath an exterior that seems entirely wholesome. Daly, whom non-Review viewers might recognize from his cheerful turn in the commercials for used the car retailer CarMax, has an unthreatening, Waspy everyman look that he uses to subversive effect, creating characters that outwardly seem strait-laced and well-adjusted, but have a hidden desperation to them. (See also: Terrence Cutler, his high-school principal from the HBO comedy Eastbound and Down, who started out stable and gradually unspooled as the show progressed.) With his side parting and tweed jacket, Forrest might look like a sitcom dad, but he’s ultimately an arrogant, selfish, cowardly and frequently unpleasant figure.

Still, for all his faults, Forrest is less Review’s villain than its victim. Some believe that the show’s true monster is Grant, Review’s producer, whose desire to make compelling television often outweighs his concern for Forrest’s wellbeing. Culpable too are the show’s imaginary viewers, sending in cruel suggestions for things for Forrest to review, such as “getting kicked in the nuts”.

“They look at it as kind of like Jackass,” Daly says. “They’re asking themselves: ‘What horrible thing can I put Forrest through?’ They don’t have a lot of respect for him and his process.” Daly compares them to social media trolls who, “under the cover of anonymity, say horrible things to one another, and don’t think about how it gets received the other end.”

Whoever is to blame for Forrest’s terrible lot, it’s clear things aren’t going to get any better for him in Review’s third and final season. One of the indignities he’s forced to undergo in its opening episode is putting a pet to sleep, a task that moves the show into its darkest territory yet. What’s more, Forrest has to negotiate all this while facing trial for murder as a result of review that went tragically wrong. He is also recovering from the events at the end of season two, when he and Grant went tumbling into a ravine after a disagreement. That latter event has given Forrest a renewed sense of purpose to continue his reviewing crusade. “He believes that God has asked him to continue the important work of reviewing life experiences,” Daly explains.

Such talk of higher powers leads on neatly to Review’s final reckoning, with some fans suggesting that the show might conclude with the revelation that Forrest’s ordeal has actually taken place in purgatory. Sadly, Daly quashes the notion.

“We loved that theory, but we have always seen Review as being more of a Job story,” Daly teases, before revealing that the show’s director read the biblical tale in preparation for the final season. He’s understandably reluctant to reveal how Forrest’s own saga resolves itself – he won’t even confirm how many episodes the final season will feature (“We want to surprise people”) – but he does concede that he is unlikely to give up his reviewing game willingly.

“I don’t want to spoil how it ends, but I will say that Forrest is a person who loves his work and would love to go on forever.” You suspect that not even amputation or tigers will stop him.