Netflix’s American Vandal is a satirical take on true crime documentaries like HBO’s The Jinx, or Netflix’s Making A Murderer. The true crime niche is one Netflix has excelled at, so taking on a series that pokes fun at the genre, which is a staple of their success, is an interesting move. The focus of the story is on Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro), a high school senior and class clown who’s blamed for spray painting penises on 27 cars in the faculty parking lot. He’s been expelled for a crime that he may not have committed simply because he’s a known dick drawer according to his classmates and the faculty. Two sophomores from the AV Club, Peter Maldonado and Sam Ecklund, take matters into their own hands and launch an investigation to uncover if Dylan really did vandalize all those cars, or if he’s an innocent patsy blamed for someone else’s crime.

The trailer looked pretty funny, so I was up for seeing where the story would go over the course of eight episodes. I had no idea how intriguing American Vandal would turn out to be. On paper a show like this shouldn’t work. A show rife with dick jokes, with a mystery hinging on finding the truth behind who vandalized the cars should, pardon the play on words, peter out incredibly quickly, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. American Vandal never gives in to its own absurd jokes, instead it keeps things serious and straight faced throughout, making the absurd premise of the crime and the continuing phallic gags even more hilarious. The high school setting with its clicks and politics, including the teacher’s and their own personal biases, builds an incredibly dense and multifaceted drama, shedding light on the nuances and intricacies of how intense life feels at this age. Things during high school are blown way out of proportion for how important they really are in the scheme of things, and American Vandal plays on this to its benefit.

The use of social media and how integrated it is into the lives of high school students plays a huge role in the unraveling of the mystery. There’s an entire party scene recreated using nothing more than images and video from the social media accounts of those in attendance. Maldonado and Ecklund go over every minute detail of people’s movements in order to deduce who stole a particular spray paint can from the party, which was later used in the vandalism. The coverage of the party is so all consuming, that nearly every aspect of the party’s timeline can be accounted for. Not only are Maldonado and Ecklund able to track everyone’s movements, but the videos also allow them to be flies on the wall during snippets of conversation they use to figure out the possible intentions of the suspects. The choreography involved in the recreation of the party scene is incredibly intricate, but American Vandal pulls it off in an effortless way.

Sussing out the truth involves whether or not Dylan’s preferred penis drawing style involves ball hairs or not, as well as getting to the root of the trustworthiness of the only supposed witness to the crime, Alex Trimboli. Since Alex has been known to make wild claims, like one of the most popular girls at school gave him a handjob at camp, Maldonado and Ecklund grill possible witnesses to the handjob, as well as Alex himself, ala Perry Mason. The breaking down of Alex’s claims includes a dead serious stick figure 3D rendering of the handjob occurring, which includes the positions of possible witnesses and their lines of sight. It’s like watching a dirty version of “The Magic Bullet Theory” discussed in Oliver Stone’s JFK. If they can prove the accuracy of Alex’s account of his dockside handy, then perhaps he really did see Dylan paint all of the dicks. Alex’s truthfulness is eventually called into question.

More important than whether Dylan did or did not paint the penises in question is the social dynamic, influences, and forces working against Dylan’s sense of self worth at high school. The social commentary of American Vandal is buried in the absurdity of the story, but becomes incredibly moving toward the end. Dylan’s older brother was a hell raiser who gave teachers a hard time, and because of it the Spanish teacher, Ms. Shapiro, has had it out for Dylan since the day he arrived. She constantly tells him he’s a screw up, will never amount to anything, and is a bad apple. This constant negative reinforcement has Dylan convinced he’s a worthless burnout, and once he’s been exonerated for the spray painting crimes, he can’t help but screw it all up by getting caught painting a dick on Ms. Shapiro’s driveway. When asked why he did it after all of the trouble to prove his innocence, he tells the filmmakers it’s what people expect from him.

It’s amazing what the constant degradation of a person’s self worth will lead them to believe about themselves, and in this, American Vandal takes its cues from the “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Exercises” Jane Elliott conducted with her third grade classes in the 1970’s. In these exercises children with particular eye colors are told they are smarter and better than students with different eye colors, and the impact on the way this reinforcement of superiority affects some students, and inferiority affects others, changes the social dynamics of the classroom drastically. The children told they are superior begin treating the other kids like second class citizens, and those told they are inferior act out as if they truly are less smart or not as good as the other kids. The correlation of being told you’re worthless day in and day out and what having it drilled into Dylan for years has done to him, is what’s most enlightening about how American Vandal nails the high school experience.

There are kids in every school treated as less than’s by both their peers and by faculty, and these kids come to actually believe this about themselves. They’re never really given a chance, and the expectation of them being losers or misfits is what pushes them to act as if it were true. We as a society are failing these kids, and it’s remarkable that a show like American Vandal is the thing to really drive this reality home. It’s hard to fight against negative stereotyping, especially in the highly clicky and blown out of proportion world of high school adolescence where one screw up can become a nickname that follows you through the remainder of your time at school, and possibly beyond. It doesn’t matter that Dylan didn’t paint those 27 dicks on the faculty cars, what matters is that everyone believed he did without any proof. American Vandal is far more touching, powerful, and serious than you’d expect. It’s a hell of a social commentary hidden in plain sight as if it were a joke.