Critics and viewers who initially imagined Netflix's mockumentary series American Vandal might be a one-note dick joke were quick to admit they were wrong.
Audiences remain riveted as high school documentarian Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) follows a trail of spray-painted phalluses snaking through a high school faculty parking lot to unravel a low-stakes, even ridiculous, mystery. Simple on its face, Vandal's plot boils down to just four words: "Who drew the dicks?"
But the series transcends the snicker-inducing premise of investigating whether student Dylan Maxwell (YouTube star Jimmy Tatro) drew them. It does so, according to co-creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda, by treating the inquiry as seriously as a murder case in a true-crime documentary. Using the crime-show conventions of series such as The Jinx and The Staircase, they aim to get viewers as obsessed with this mystery as they may have been with Netflix's Making a Murderer or the podcast Serial.
"The goal, even in the original pitch, was that if your roommate was watching the show and you walked into the room, it would take you 10 minutes to realize it was fictional," Perrault says.
However, the filmmakers in American Vandal are only high school sophomores. So Perrault, Yacenda and showrunner Dan Lagana had to make viewers not only care about the story and its flawed central character but also believe that what they are seeing was created by teenagers.
"We had a lot of rules shooting, even though it looks like Peter and Sam [Griffin Gluck] are just going around with cameras," Yacenda explains. "We'd make sure our operators were working at exactly the same height, and sometimes we'd have Tyler and Griffin, the actors, operate cameras in certain scenes, in case it picked up one of the kids with the other camera." Yacenda, Perrault and Lagana also had to craft shots to be believably imperfect, yet not so amateurish as to distract viewers.
"We had to add flaws," Yacenda says. "Such as block things out so the camera wouldn't pan to the right person at the right line at the right moment, which you see in a lot of mockumentaries." Before Vandal began shooting, the trio studied how to avoid the perfect punchline shot, Lagana says. "We'd see something on a comedy show and say, 'There's something we don't want to do.' The polished comedy isn't our favorite kind of storytelling. Anytime there was a joke, we'd cut it."
They were more interested in building on the pioneering mockumentary work of Ricky Gervais, co-creator of The Office, and Mike Clattenburg, creator of Trailer Park Boys.
"The genre stopped pushing its own limits," Lagana says. "With Vandal, we wanted to help the mockumentary format evolve." In season two, viewers also might pick up on more classic influences, such as the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, directed by Errol Morris, and particularly the 2004 French miniseries The Staircase, directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade.
The writers have discussed whether season two should have more of a "fly-on-the-wall" feel reminiscent of The Staircase, Yacenda says. "Seeing the family dynamics is one of the coolest things about The Staircase."
Peter and Sam will be back — in a private, out-of-state high school — to examine another crime. But the writers want to challenge themselves to reinvent rather than repeat what they did in season one, Lagana says, noting, "All of our favorite shows evolve."
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 3, 2018
