Ian Thomas Malone

Plenty of great sitcoms have made their settings feel like characters in their own narratives. It’s hard to think of Cheers or Seinfeld without the culture of Boston or New York coming to mind, putting aside the inconvenient fact that both shows were filmed in Los Angeles. With Comedy Central’s new show South Side, from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon alumni Bashir Salahuddin, Diallo Riddle and Michael Bliedenl, Chicago lies at the forefront of the narrative. Filmed entirely on location, using actors who grew up in the city, the show delivers laughs at a mile a minute against a backdrop that puts the audience at the heart of the narrative.

South Side features an ensemble cast of predominantly black actors, using the local appliance rental store Rent-T-Own as its primary setting. Salahuddin’s brother Sultan stars as Simon, a recent community college graduate looking for more upward mobility than life as a repo man. Kareme Young co-stars as Kareem, similarly looking for a better life, especially since his brother Quincy (played by Kareme’s real-life brother Quincy Young), serves as Rent-T-Own’s manager, constantly struggling to encourage a semblance of professionalism amongst his uninspired staff.

Chandra Russell is perhaps the show’s breakout star as Sergeant Turner, a police officer constantly unsure of whether to do good or take care of herself in the process. Alongside Bashir Salahuddin’s “Officer Goodnight” the two cops are absolutely hilarious to watch as they skirt ethical lines, taking sides on disputes over Xbox repossessions and Air Jordans that give plenty of food for thought well after you’re finished laughing.

The writing on South Side is absolutely superb. Salahuddin and Riddle have the rare ability to sneak nail-biting jokes into dialogue when you least expect it, the kind of comedic timing that’s intertwined into the plot rather than as a throwaway gag. They find humor in just about every subject, from child-support disputes to Coretta Scott King.

The narrative finds the sweet spot between episodic and serialized across its first season. You don’t necessarily need to watch every episode in order to follow along, but there’s plenty of references that reward those who do. Much of the plots are presented almost like vignettes, but there is a sense of character growth as the show progresses. These characters are here to make you laugh, but the actors engage with them in a way that brings out a level of authenticity you don’t necessarily expect from most sitcoms.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of South Side is the way it feels culturally relevant without being overly political. Police corruption, racial injustice, and income inequality are hardly conventional comedic topics, but the show presents them in a humorous fashion that never feels like it’s making light of the broader issues. National politics are left out entirely, instead focusing in on the struggles of Chicago that have existed for decades. This is a show about the South Side by people who grew up there, presented in a fashion that’s quite accessible for an audience that may not be very familiar with the local culture.

South Side is the funniest new show of 2019. Each episode has more laugh out loud moments than plenty of other comedies manage in an entire season. The writing and acting are spectacular. Salahuddin and Riddle’s love letter to their community is the must-watch show of the summer.

America has changed quite a bit since John Hughes started crafting his iconic narratives about the struggles of teenage life. It’s hard to imagine a group like The Breakfast Club sitting around a circle talking with each other when the option to simply stare at one’s phone presents itself. Teenagers nowadays are exposed to a whole world beyond the classroom, not just the self-portraits of genitals that circulate over dating apps. The characters in HBO’s Euphoria would have little use for the now-legal pot with fentanyl offering a far more potent high.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Euphoria aims to provide a certain kind of visual high, with luscious color schemes that draw the audience into its elaborate sets. The desire to go beneath the surface, to understand the drive that makes these kids behave in such destructive ways, remains present through each episode. Trouble is, the show doesn’t really have anything to say.

Zendaya anchors the cast as Rue, a drug addict caught in the cycle of addiction. Rue also serves as the show’s narrator, often providing illuminating background on the show’s other characters. Zendaya’s performance suggests a level of depth to Rue that Euphoria seems all too content to leave unexplored. There remains the idea that there’s a hidden complexity lurking behind her detached demeanor, but much of that sentiment feels like undeserved mystique for a show that never bothered to fully flesh out its characters.

A similar kind of dynamic plays out with Hunter Schafer’s Jules, a trans girl with a warm heart and a penchant for picking unworthy men. Schafer is an excellent actress, bringing a sense of awe and wonder to a character desperate to belong in a world that had been previously closed off to her. Trouble is, she’s not really given much to work with.

Euphoria wastes much of Schafer’s talents with its lazy approach to transgender storytelling, far too preoccupied with surface level clichés to present anything original. Jules is less her own character than a vehicle for the trauma of others, a new chapter in the manic pixie dream girl trope. The show misses an easy opportunity to break new ground in the way transgender people are portrayed on screen, instead choosing to spend its time on what an attraction to Jules might mean for another character’s sexuality.

The cast is perhaps too big for its own good. None of the male characters are particularly interesting, to some extent an inevitable byproduct of its splintered focus. Barbie Ferreira gives the strongest performance of the bunch as Kat, a teen eager to explore her sexuality in a world primarily interested in objectifying her. The show would be vastly better off centering its attention around Rue, Jules, and Kat, allowing it to go a little deeper than the tropes it consistently centers itself around.

Euphoria relies too often on shock value as a substitute for substance. There are plenty of things to like about the show, from its strong cast to its stellar production value. The narrative struggles to stand out in a world where plenty of people can look elsewhere besides premium TV to see the kinds of visual once deemed edgy. Very few television shows put full frontal male nudity up on the screen, but like the dick pics it often features, there’s just something oddly uninteresting about that kind of imagery in the year 2019.