User Reviews

Right away, I could tell "Bad Boy" would be a brodude show. It begins with an episode which misleads me to believe this story will be about an overprotective single father and his slutty teenage daughter. The father is Scott Kensington, played by Artie O'Daly, an actor unknown by me but who plays a middle-aged screenwriter in LA and leads a comfortable life. When we first meet him, he's interrogating his daughter's latest boyfriend, who's a street-tough gangster-type named Mack, before they go on a first date. Mack's the kind of guy who's never graduated high school and now wears dark grey hoodies with its sleeves torn off. He's also got a body that naturally produces its own oil that glistens on his muscular abs. "How about you tell me about yourself before you ruin her forever?", Scott asks him, not unreasonably.

"I'm twenty...uh, something," Mack informs him. "I actually don't know my age because my mom used my birth certificate to light my dad's car on fire when I was a kid." Turns out, Scott's not horrified about what Mack might do to his teenaged daughter but to his sweet baby dog, who's named Jessica, and whom Mack has been hired to take on a walk. The entire conversation has been misdirection, and Scott and Mack, we later learn, are both gay.

O'Daly is terrific as Scott, whom everyone calls "Daddy Scott", and who has the unenviable task of playing an older man who has no idea of why his dull life is suddenly being invaded by FBI agents convinced he's Mack's real-life fugitive father, and the head of crime syndicate. He's the kind of gentle-hearted doofus who wears Ralph Lauren bathrobes, loves Abba, and thinks Bloody Mary mix is an aphrodisiac. Scott's so unlikely a criminal that soon Mack's entire full-on trailer-park wreck of a family - including a boozy aunt (Theresa Ryan) who's prone to mistakenly hitting on her own son during a binger, various cousins and unsavory relatives -- reaches the same conclusion: Scott will be everyone's Daddy, and a juicy meal ticket to boot. It's only been a handful of short episodes and already I'm checking if this show is available for purchase on iTunes. I wasn't expecting it to be the smartest comedy series since the first season of "Galavant".

Mack's younger brother is Jim (Drew Canan), who got roofied by his cousin as a teenager and was abandoned in the woods for two years, turned into the "Feral Boy of India-nuh", and later shot a porn video about his experiences in the wilderness that became a worldwide sensation. He's now an ex-stripper who sneaks to live unaware in Scott's home, is utterly obsessed with Harry Potter and sorcery, and has an equally-hilarious obsession on becoming the unwanted subject of Scott's latest screenplay. Braden Davis rounds out the cast as B. J., a cousin who's a Peter-Pan type and wants to break into the porn business to make his family proud, but who's secretly jealous because Jim's face is on the cover of a DVD while his own is "only on a poster depicting what happens when you don't wear condoms".

This is the kind of show that actors crowdfund themselves when they grow tired of playing "Neighbor #2" in short films that will only ever screen at film festivals. Having spent so much time and energy to finally star in their own series, they're not gonna blow it. It's the type of show that lives or dies by the writing and its performances. There is no hiding bad acting in a web series such as this one. Thankfully, everyone here seems to have had a part in writing their own character and don't try to add more subtext than a murder-mystery involving the Werther's Originals Hard Candy family fortune, ninja assassins who moonlight as caterers, and a bunch of shirtless gym bros can already carry. Meanwhile, a scene where Scott accidentally serves horrifically poisoned pizza to his dinner guests is drop-dead funny because it's done completely without malice and by a sensitive beta male who has no idea what he's doing in the middle of a murder mystery in the first place.

In one of the show's funniest ongoing bits, Alina Bock hilariously channels Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau super-freakiness to perfection, playing a brainless undercover FBI agent named Calista Flockhart who's convinced that Scott is a murderer and constantly trying to make him admit it. Alex Dyon arrives late in the show's run but steals every scene as a "smoldering" best friend who might be a vampire. There's even room for Vanessa Marano, playing herself, who offers brutal commentary on her own fan-hated character from "The Gilmore Girls", a show unseen by me but which is the constant butt of jokes in this one. "Can we do this somewhere else!?" Scott finally exclaims, pulling everyone off the street. "My neighbors already believe I'm running an insane asylum, and I don't need to give them physical proof."

What I admire most about "Bad Boy" is its wholesomeness. It contains none of the vulgarity and gross-out humor that sink most comedies made in the 2020s. The comedy is based on wit, one-liners, and sight gags rather than spurting bodily fluids, f-bombs, and excrement. It doesn't always hold together, and there are several episodes - especially a finale that unfortunately channels "Clue: The Movie" - that miss their mark, but when a low-budget YouTube web comedy starring a largely-gay cast doesn't involve a single sex scene, never takes place in a bar or club, and isn't the story of some narcissistic and misunderstood fitness model with rock-hard abs bemoaning his status as a single man, it's a triumph in my book. "It's Showgirls meets Harry Potter!", a character says at one point. As if. ***1/2 stars.