Comedian Tom Walker and his co-writer Andrew Doyle have plied a healthy trade in viral rants with Jonathan Pie, the fake Westminster correspondent perpetually teetering on the precipice of his paper-thin patience, driven to apoplexy by the sheer stupidity of everyone on all sides of the political spectrum – apart from him. Jonathan Pie’s American Pie (BBC Three) takes this shtick away from its natural home of minutes-long shareable clips and extends it to an hour-long mockumentary, a format being slowly throttled by the BBC’s incessant overuse of it.
In November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, a Pie video was released pointing out that of course Trump won. “How can everyone be so fucking stupid?” he ranted, blaming, among others, himself, as a person on the left; Hillary Clinton; and a culture of no-platforming that closed in on free speech. “Not everyone who voted for Trump is a sexist or a racist. Some of them are, but most aren’t,” he announced. It quickly went viral and proved popular on right-wing news sites. I mention this particular clip because the premise of American Pie is that same argument, stretched out for an hour, two years after the fact.
Pie has been sent to the US to report on the midterm elections. Clearly they were hoping that it would be a GOP knockout, so that his frustratingly superficial: “I told you so” analysis could be employed to mediocre effect once more. That was not the case, which leaves this as a curious rerun of arguments that have been made repeatedly over the past two years by people with greater political insight and better comedy chops.
There is a long segment on why Clinton was a bad candidate, in 2016, that turns into a cheap point about how the news can be edited to tell any story the media – of which Pie is both critic and participant – wants to tell. At last, someone calling out fake news! But the focus, still, is on who voted for Trump and why. Pie meets a comedian and a singer who voted for the president, as well as a handful of regular-Joe Trump supporters, who explain their essentially understandable justifications for choosing him over Clinton. The devastating conclusion Pie reaches is that not all Trump supporters are “toothless hillbillies with banjos”. Nor are they racist and sexist, he says, without specifying who he thinks believes that: British people? BBC Three viewers? His own fans?
Disingenuously, Pie includes himself in the category of lefty-liberal morons who think everyone in a Maga hat is one step away from fascism, and rallies against them, which manoeuvres him into a position of cynical immunity. Towards the end, there is a long, sweeping and patronising explanation of why “refusing robust debate” is leading to the rise of populism. I kept waiting for the punchline, the satire, the insight, but none arrived. More depressingly, this came after an interview with a white supremacist who advocates “a white ethno-state”, justified because, as Pie insisted, his views need to be aired in order to be challenged. The arrogance of Pie assuming that he is the person to dismantle this terrible person’s horrible views would be fair if he challenged them properly. But it is a desperately weak segment in which Pie simply declares those views – in favour of ethnic cleansing – to be “pretty abhorrent”.
The format does it no favours. It was billed as “Louis Theroux meets Alan Partridge” and there is a running gag about whether Theroux would have done it differently. But Partridge is funny because he is pathetic and human; Pie just has a sneering superiority complex. Theroux offers insight because he listens to people; Pie has too many scores to settle to offer an impartial ear. Odder still is a transparently “humanising” backstory about Pie’s collapsing family, which is intended to solder a heart on to this cold slice of cynicism. I understand the appeal of Pie’s “it’s just common sense” clips, even if the last thing I would choose to watch is another man shouting furiously about how stupid everyone is.
He has millions of followers, and perhaps they will love seeing even more of him, but the truth is that there’s little to justify taking it beyond a few minutes.
