At first glance, Review appears to be comedy in which someone makes a major production of doing basic things in a very stiff, social-anthropology, insider-playing-at-outsider way Sasha Baron Cohen in khakis. This is indeed the basic approach. But the shows genius is that instead of treating each review as a separate, self-contained event, mined for jokes then never referred to again, theres continuity between all of them. The magical comedy reset button youd expect them to hit after Forrest, say, gets addicted to cocaine, overdoses, and goes to rehab, never gets hit. The experiences build one on top of another.
Thats the angle that stands out to actor James Urbaniak, who plays Forrests amoral producer/enabler Grant. Theres an element of it being a satire of reality TV, he says. In reality TV, you make decisions that have an emotional effect on people but are restricted by the parameters of the game or the competition. [Review] is breaking down those parameters, so hes making very big decisions, like getting divorced, that affect his whole life.
Affect is an understatement. Even though the only time he acknowledges it before the first season finale is in one brief fit of self-pity while eating an enormous stack of pancakes (dont ask), Review shows Forrest slowly but surely destroying his life and the lives of everyone around him. His marriage ends. Multiple people get killed. All under the rubric of this preposterous high-concept mockumentary show.
In other words, Review is a satire not just of reality shows, but of New Golden Age of Television antihero dramas, hiding in plain sight. It takes the basic man ruins all he cares about in the name of something that makes him nominally freer and more powerful structure of the genre and plays it for deliberate laughs. Instead of a meth empire or a mafia family or a double life, he commits his bad acts in the name of the television show that chronicles them. Hes Walter White, but without the sense that theres anything tragic about him hes just an oblivious faux-smart buffoon. Its a satire of the middle-class middle-aged white-male entitlement and privilege that all the big dramas treat as the stuff of life.