Dick-adjacent buffoonery is central to the charm of the Netflix show. Illustration by Mark Todd

There may be no genre of television easier to parody than true crime. The style is formulaic by design: an atrocity is followed by an investigation, a left turn, a revelation, fin. Think “America’s Most Wanted,” or “Dateline.” Fictionalized variations of the idea, in which a crime is committed, scrutinized, and solved within the hour, are called procedurals for good reason. The accoutrements (plastic evidence bags, grainy security footage, an incriminating fibre tweezed from a corpse) are consistent from episode to episode, and the action unfolds in the same way each time. True crime allows for more uncertainty—sometimes the wrong man is fingered—but the sight of a perpetrator being hustled off in handcuffs remains satisfying, because we knew it was coming, and because it signals the deliverance of justice. Bad things happen, but not without consequences.

The popularity of true crime (and its dramatized brethren) has never really ebbed. But in late 2014, when the podcast “Serial” débuted, to considerable acclaim—it examined the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an eighteen-year-old high-school student—the genre was suddenly allotted new mainstream credence. (Two similar TV series, “The Jinx,” on HBO, and “Making a Murderer,” on Netflix, appeared in 2015.) Yet perhaps the best proof of true crime’s resurgence is “American Vandal,” an eight-episode series released by Netflix earlier this year. The show applies the grave and dramatic conventions of the form to a delightfully absurdist transgression: someone at the fictional Hanover High School spray-painted a bunch of cherry-red dicks on twenty-seven cars in the faculty parking lot.

Hanover High is situated in Oceanside, California, an anodyne, vaguely middle-class suburb; it could be anybody’s high school, in anybody’s home town. The show’s creators, Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda, writers of sketches featured on the Web sites Funny or Die and CollegeHumor, make use of the same social hierarchies that have fuelled several decades of coming-of-age films. Everybody submits to his or her conscripted role: the artsy kid, the overachiever, the burnout, the nerd, the jock, the joker, and, inevitably, for one young woman, the Hottest Girl in School. When the graffiti is first discovered, everyone immediately looks to Dylan Maxwell, an archetypal troublemaker with a deep voice, a wounded demeanor, and a wardrobe of hooded sweatshirts. (Jimmy Tatro, a YouTube star and comedian, is terrific in the role; he plays Dylan with an artful mixture of defensiveness and guilelessness.) That the student body at Hanover is so quickly and thoroughly gripped by the mystery of the dicks feels reasonable. In high school, even the most mundane experiences can seem unbearably high-stakes.

Early in the first episode, one of Dylan’s peers describes him as “the stupidest kid I’ve ever met.” Dylan has a history of antagonizing his teachers, and of gleefully scribbling dicks on stuff. The school board has an eyewitness—Alex Trimboli (Calum Worthy), a simpering, clammy Eagle Scout with braces, who claims to have seen Dylan racing around the parking lot, rendering dick after dick—and Dylan is expelled, despite otherwise wobbly evidence. Though current events have heightened awareness of the menace of unchecked male sexuality, dicks and dick-adjacent buffoonery are nonetheless central to the charm of “American Vandal.” I’m unashamed to admit that I found the dicks to be a shockingly resilient and lively punch line—a truly evergreen jape. (“I’ll never understand what’s so amusing about penises,” one teacher says, resignedly.)

Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez), a broadcaster on Hanover’s morning show and an aspiring filmmaker, finds the school board’s decision unsatisfying. He decides to investigate the crime himself, and enlists his buddy Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck) to help produce a documentary series. Together, they interview potential suspects, dispute the credibility of Alex’s testimony—if Alex lied about drinking eleven beers at a party, and about receiving a dockside hand job from the Hottest Girl in School, what else might he be lying about?—interrogate purported alibis, and attempt to re-create the crime so that they may establish a more precise timeline. (This involves spray-painting dicks onto cardboard, which allows them to calculate a more exact time-per-dick figure.) In one of several tense reveals, Peter and Sam discover that Dylan’s preferred style of dick includes a few scraggly pubic hairs. The dicks on the faculty cars are smooth.

What does it mean? As the series unfolds, Dylan continues to seem like the most likely culprit—everything in his comportment suggests dick-drawer. But Peter and Sam are tireless investigators, even when their work gets them banned from campus. Peter, especially, takes instinctively to the role of beleaguered but determined detective, dogged in his quest for truth, regardless of whether Dylan deserves or appreciates his advocacy. He has a hyper-methodical approach to gathering and interpreting information. Much of the show’s comedy comes from the juxtaposition of Peter’s unblinking formality with the pure dumbness of the crime. Peter firmly believes that, if he can just present his data, he can right any wrong.

Like every documentarian, Peter has his own agenda, which may not always be righteous, or compatible with his subject’s. (Midway through the season, his aggressive pursuit of a piece of evidence results in its destruction.) In the fifth episode, Peter’s series goes viral, and he has to reckon with the weight of his own influence. “No one listened to me when I hosted the morning show,” he admits in a grim voice-over. “But everyone is listening now.” In the finale, Dylan becomes frustrated by his portrayal in the documentary, and by his classmates’ unkind reaction to the allegations against him. “I’m not who they think I am,” he says, pacing outside a houseparty. “They think I’m some fucking dumb-ass.”

Along the way, Peter and Sam explore various subplots centering on a cruel and potentially predatory gym teacher, several doomed romantic entanglements, and, eventually, their creative partnership. (Peter will do or reveal anything in service of the documentary; Sam has reservations.)

“American Vandal” is relentless in its mockery of true-crime tropes, from its ponderous theme song to Peter’s absolute certainty about the redemptive power of facts. The show exposes and satirizes its formula by proving that it’s not the crime that transfixes viewers but the investigation. In between its endless dick jokes, “American Vandal” can be a brutal indictment of how the culture codifies and institutionalizes narrative. We hunger for conclusions, especially when there aren’t any good ones. Even the presence of the descriptor “American” in the show’s title feels like a subtle gag—a reminder that applying the adjective to almost any noun now imparts instant gravitas, an assurance that whatever is being explored can be slotted into some grand and solemn continuum. There will be meaning.

But what if the biggest joke of all is the idea that something revelatory about human nature can be divined from outlier instances of heinousness—that every small story is a bigger story? When Peter gets to the end of his project, he realizes that he has come up short on meta-narratives. He finally describes high school as a “span of time with more questions than answers.” What was the meaning of the dicks? What if there was no meaning? What if it truly doesn’t matter who did it, or why, or if they ever get caught?

Human beings are so uncomfortable with ambiguity that we’ll do nearly anything to avoid it. In “American Vandal,” this avoidance ultimately leads to a strange kind of self-actualization, in which the show’s antihero eventually succumbs to his peers’ faulty expectations of him. “What the fuck? If that’s what everyone thinks, then maybe that’s just who I am,” Dylan says. “I’m the bad guy.” It is, at least, a way to avoid being the worst thing of all: nothing. ♦