In the Know Review | Mike Judge Perfectly Satirizes Liberals in New Animated Comedy

Summary

• In the Know is a funny satire of liberals and woke ideology that is also sympathetic to the fact that we’re all hypocrites who fail to be our best selves.
• The show is surprisingly relaxing and quietly touching, with space for developing relationships and thoughtful moments.
• The voice cast, especially Zach Woods, is excellent, and the unique use of celebrity interviews adds to the show’s appeal.

Mike Judge has always had a great instinct for excellent satire, the kind that is honest and descriptive yet doesn’t exploit or necessarily insult its target. King of the Hill satirized so-called ‘rednecks’ with gentle truth, Office Space attacked corporate bureaucracy with great sympathy for its drones and victims, Beavis & Butthead made great fun of teenagers and media-obsessed Gen Xers and the coming Millennial generation, and so on. Now, Judge teams up with the wonderful Zach Woods (Avenue 5, The Office, Silicon Valley) and Brandon Gardner (Bud, David) for another delightful satire in this vein, In the Know.

In the Know is unique in that it’s a scripted, stop-motion animated comedy about the crew of a radio talk show, but also includes the interviews with celebrities that the fictional talk show consists of, breaking into live-action for them. Zach Woods, who is perfect as a narcissistic twig of a radio host, Lauren Caspian, conducts the interviews in character, incorporating plot points from each episode. He speaks to Kaia Gerber, Jonathan Van Ness, Ken Burns, Finn Wolfhard, Norah Jones, Tegan and Sara, Nicole Byer, Roxane Gay, Mike Tyson, Jorge Masvidal, and Hugh Laurie throughout the show, an odd but endearing cross-section of humanity.

The brief series draws a lot of laughs from the awkwardness of good intentions, with liberals going out of their way to virtue signal or be as politically correct as possible. It’s also surprisingly moving at points, creating space for developing relationships and quietly touching moments. With its lack of a laugh-track and almost no score, the show is mysteriously relaxing, like a mixture of NewsRadio and Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. While it has some awkward missteps, In the Know is ultimately a rewarding and tickling experience.

The Quiet Cast of In the Know

In the Know

4 /5

Release Date January 25, 2024

Creator Brandon Gardner, Mike Judge, Zach Woods

Cast J. Smith-Cameron , Charlie Bushnell , Zach Woods , Mike Judge , Caitlin Reilly , Carl Tart

Seasons 1

Pros

• A consistently funny satire of liberals and woke ideology that’s also compassionate.
• In the Know is surprisingly relaxing and quietly touching.
• A great cast and a unique use of celebrity interviews make this great.

Cons

• Some of the jokes and characters are a little too one-dimensional.

An animated series lives or dies on its voice cast, and fortunately, In the Know has perfect casting. Carl Tart is confidently funny and kind as Carl, the main sound engineer for the titular radio show. He develops a sweet relationship with the executive producer of Lauren’s talk show, Barb (a funny and very Midwestern J. Smith-Cameron), and their dialogue together seems straight from an indie rom-com. It’s a great relationship.

Charlie Bushnell (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) voices the intern in the office, a Floridian frat boy whose parents are sizable NPR donors. He’s hilariously open and has a joie de vivre that’s lacking in the office. He embarks on a very funny friendship with Sandy, the culture critic for the radio show, who likes to wait a couple of years after seeing films before reviewing them. Sandy, voiced by Mike Judge, is the closest that In the Know gets to absurdism and breaking its generally grounded, realistic vibes. He’s an old survivor of the ’60s and ’70s and has obviously fried his brain beyond functionality from drugs or whatever else he’s imbibed. He’s a perfect pair for a frat boy.

Then there’s Fabian, played by the hilarious and endlessly charming Caitlin Reilly, who transforms her voice perfectly here. Fabian does the research and fact-checking for Lauren’s interviews, and is probably the closest In the Know gets to being one-note and banal in its satire. The character epitomizes the right-wing perception of liberals. She needs an emotional support candle, she feels personally violated and assaulted by someone’s cologne, she summarizes one interviewee as a “straight white male, that’s all you need to know,” and so on. She even corrects the super-PC Lauren when he mentions an unhoused person, proffering a lengthy and more up-to-date way of speaking about the unhoused.

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Some of Fabian’s dialogue is genuinely funny, but her obnoxiousness and blandly one-dimensional exaggeration of wokeness gets very tiresome. Whereas other characters have complications and human dimensions, and seem sympathetic in their awkwardness and desire to be ‘virtuous and good’ people, Fabian is simply a nightmare of a human being. She’s the show’s biggest misstep. However, In the Know must be applauded for giving Fabian some emotional development over time, especially after she engages in a personally meaningful pre-interview with MMA fighter Jorge Masvidal. He’s a very funny guest star here, and gives Fabian a chance to ruminate and evolve a little. Unfortunately, it happens too late in the series.

Zach Woods Is the Best

The character dynamics really make In the Know, but in the end, its greatest successes comes down to one character and their actor, Zach Woods. Woods is simply one of the funniest people working in television today, but also one of the most quietly thoughtful. His nihilistic customer liaison in the hilarious Avenue 5, Matt, is one of the greatest characters in recent comedy history, and he injected new life into The Office. He was often the funniest part of Silicon Valley, where he last worked with Mike Judge. His improvisational skills are astounding, and his writing and directing talents are developing into something beautiful (best seen in his short films with In the Know co-creator Brandon Gardner, Bud and David).

Woods is on fire here, lighting up In the Know whenever he speaks. The funniest aspects are his interviews; it’s unclear how much of these are completely scripted and how much Woods is solely responsible, but what his character does in the interviews with celebrities is wonderful. And Lauren’s plot in each episode is usually the most hilarious, from thinking his body is mechanically racist to lamenting the passive nature of his sperm.

In Woods’ interview with MovieWeb, the actor said that the show is essentially making fun of people like himself (sensitive liberals with a passion for social justice). It’s clear that Woods knows himself, his limitations, and how silly some of his impulses can be, and he taps into all of it perfectly in his portrayal of Lauren Caspian. His character, looking like Ira Glass by way of Barton Fink, is an instant classic in the animated world. Caspian deserves to stand alongside Jay Sherman of The Critic, Coach McGuirk of Home Movies, the aforementioned Dr. Katz, and young Bobby from King of the Hill as one of the best characters in mature animation.

ShadowMachine and the Surprising Tenderness of In the Know

The stop-motion puppetry of In the Know is another winning facet of the Peacock series. ShadowMachine, the animation studio behind the work here, has evolved over the past 20 years to become one of the best in the business. Responsible for early Adult Swims shows like Robot Chicken and the utter masterpiece Moral Orel, the studio has gone on to animate revered titles like BoJack Horseman and Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning Pinocchio.

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With In the Know, they approach the kind of uncanny likeness and humorous subtleties that we saw in the beautifully designed Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa. Each character looks great, and it helps that most of them have a frumpled frustration to their disposition half the time anyway. In our interview, Woods made a brilliant parallel between the animation and one of the themes of the show:

“We’re all being whittled down all the time. We’re whittled down by ourselves, algorithmically whittled down on social media, politically whittled down. There’s a kind of eagerness to reduce people to a single thing and be like, ‘Oh, that’s this person. This is what they are.’ And I think something we wanted to push up against in this and everything we make is that people are usually a gazillion things all at once, and they don’t really make sense together, but they’re very beautiful and maddening.

“So one of the things that’s nice about stop-motion is each character is puppeteered by like 30 different people. So it’s kind of multifaceted, there’s a multi-dimensionality bred into the process, because each person is literally 30 animators plus the person who voiced them. So that kind of multiplicity of identities is really like a literal fact of the production process.”

Through tiny revelations and minor apocalypses, the characters of In the Know are shown to be so much more than whiny liberals. Just like you can’t ever understand someone simply from interviewing them (another theme of this interview-based show), you can’t paint a full picture of someone based on their political beliefs, cultural ideology, or their perspective on pronouns. It’s this understanding that keeps In the Know from being a flat, bitter critique of the woke headspace. Instead, the show is a genuinely tender portrait of the broken universality of people. We’re all awkward hypocrites, we all let our ideas triumph over our humanity, and we all fail to live up to the person we think we should be. The more we’re in the know about this truth, the better off we’ll be.

In the Know premieres on Peacock Jan. 25, 2024. You can watch it through the link below:

Watch In the Know

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