Andy Daly Tried to Review Life, and Ended Up Exposing the Flaws in 'Objective' Criticism

10 years ago, Comedy Central's Review posed a question to the prospect of our singular, only life: “But is it any good?” One man set out to answer it, and, in the process, would proceed to blow up his own life and the lives of nearly every other person he met. That man was Forrest MacNeil, played by perhaps the only man who could’ve played him: beloved character actor (and actor of characters) Andy Daly. He would dedicate himself to experiencing suggestions from viewers — from stealing, to going to an orgy, to eating a truly upsetting number of pancakes — and rating them on a scale of five stars. 

Review With Forrest MacNeil, the show within a show hosted by Forrest, could be something out of Comedy Bang! Bang!, the cult comedy podcast in which Daly regularly appears as characters like Dalton Wilcox (Poet Laureate of the West), Don DiMello, and Danny Mahoney. The connections run even deeper; so many people who worked on Review also appeared on the CBB podcast that the CBB Wiki includes an entire page devoted to them, not counting those who’ve also appeared on the CBB TV show. 

Created by Daly, Jeffrey Blitz, and Charlie Siskel, and based on the Australian show Review With Myles Barlow, Review itself can come off as a spin-off of the greater Comedy Bang! Bang! Universe. It’s structured as a series of sketches and segments, but with a long tail of continuity and running jokes snaking through from the very first episode. Daly can make you double over laughing with a scream and then cower from the screen from the excruciating awkwardness. The rapport between castmates like Jessica St. Clair (as Forrest’s long-suffering wife Suzanne) feels like the best sort of improv, when two people are so in-sync they’re bouncing off insane ideas and sentences like they’re the most natural thing in the world. 

Ordinarily, viewers expect such a sketch show to reset in between episodes, the better to allow Forrest to get addicted to cocaine and go to rehab, or learn why being a racist is a half-star experience (there’s no 0 stars). One of the show’s great pleasures is the gigantic swerves it takes in the process; the first being a review of “Divorce” that goes disastrously awry when Suzanne decides she doesn’t, in fact, want to stay married to Forrest even if it was just a bit for the show. It’s the first step in a downward spiral that exposes the delusion at the heart of Forrest, and the concept of Review as a whole. 

As portrayed by Daly, Forrest MacNeil is a monster, and maybe he always has been. Like a good reviewer, he believes wholeheartedly in the idea that his objective, completely neutral report of the most average person experiencing life is the most important thing he could offer to the world. The show, however, constantly reveals this to be a delusion in which he’s trapped himself. 

Any good reviewer will tell you that it’s impossible to be objective, no matter what you’re reviewing: movies, video games, onion rings, etc. Personal opinions always come into play; there's always the potential of bias influencing the response. Forrest himself can’t help putting his thumb on the scale: When asked to review “Being Framed,” he makes a big show about wanting his intern and his girlfriend to pick a random crime, but tries to overtly steer them towards framing him for the mild crime of stealing from an avocado tree (the one they actually choose is much, much worse). 

And then there’s Suzanne. If Review has any true ongoing storyline, it’s Forrest’s quest — like Robin Thicke before him — to get her back. He insists that he’s over her and perfectly fine but multiple times, his reviews are either predicated on trying to get Suzanne to take him back, or become journeys through the wreckage of his life. An assignment to stay in a haunted house, for instance, goes well until he considers that the real haunted house is the one he used to share with family and goes to see it once again.

At no point does he ever possess the self-awareness to realize that he may have had a hand in the creation of the haunting; fast montages of his previous exploits are spliced in as both a rapid-fire gag and a reminder of all that’s happened, but he can’t change the context of what it shows. The real world is always intruding into the world of the show, whether it be something as simple as a burrito no longer being available or a cascading chain of poor decisions coming home to roost. 

Forrest seems to believe that he can warp reality to be the perfect testing environment and can’t seem to understand why no one else responds the same way. No matter how much Suzanne may yell at him or how many legal proceedings he bungles because of his inability to be normal for five minutes, he still wraps himself in the warm, delusional belief that one day, she’ll understand that everything he did was for good of the show, and he can’t be held responsible because he’s just doing his job. 

It’s not just his lingering feelings for his ex-wife that influence him though; Forrest’s whole worldview is hilariously blinkered to the point where he seems unable to even imagine himself in another person’s shoes. His attempt at trying to understand being a gay person so he can “cure” them ends in his befuddlement at how anyone could find a penis attractive. Experiencing what it’s like to be a little person or Irish results in him adopting the most offensive and stereotypical ideas and acting as if that’s always who he’s been. 

Time after time, this approach leads to horrific outcomes that would be too awkward to witness if it weren’t balanced with crack timing (his divorce announcement to Suzanne would play as straight drama if he didn’t respond to being reminded of how it will affect his son by saying “Oh, he’s not gonna like that” in an absolutely perfect line reading). It gets to the point where it seems like the very universe is torturing him just to see how much longer he can do this show, and yet at no point does it occur to him that he could do literally any other job or even shift his reviewing methods just slightly. The star-system and concept of the show are baked into his sense of self; admitting that all of it is made up and he can choose how to experience something is impossible. 

But that’s the thing with reviewing: the scales are made up. It doesn’t matter if you use stars, or letter grades, or some needlessly precise 100-point scale, because at the end, it can only function as a recommendation. A teenager would probably give going to prom five stars as opposed to half a star, both because they’re not a middle-aged man chaperoning a teenager and also didn’t have to go to the hospital because of a cocaine induced heart attack. 

As a critic — and, let’s be honest, as a person experiencing life — you have to realize that the world does not revolve around you and your particular tastes. In this age of increasingly hacky TikToks making fun of “nine-hour Hungarian movies told from the perspective of a donkey,” it’s worth asking ourselves what we really want to get out of criticism. Review With Forrest McNeil itself even asks this, when Forrest’s perpetually worried co-host A.J. Gibbs (the underrated Megan Stevenson) takes a turn at doing his job and essentially demolishes his entire worldview. It turns out you don’t have to do every deranged thing a stranger asks you to do, and you can, in fact, give six stars if you feel like it. Forrest will never grasp this, because the job has become his entire life, and thus any deviation will mean a change to him, and there’s nothing more dangerous than having to change yourself. 

Review, in the end, also stands as a prime exploration of the sort of toxic male tantrums that would go on to absorb so much of culture and subsequent responses (most recently, the backlash to the female-led reboot of Ghostbusters recasting an irreverent comedy as a sci-fi epic); this idea that any critical reaction to something must be done from a place of complete neutrality. It leads to a mindset that says you should be able to blackmail the woman you're dating but go on living as if everything is fine. It’s at the core of the tale of a man who wrecks his own life and refuses to acknowledge that his actions might’ve had any impact on himself or the people around him, essentially acting as if his own life is an “objective review.” His obsession with Suzanne stems not only from his regret at losing her but from a belief that everyone should also treat his reviews as removed from the real world, no matter what the inevitable outcomes are. 

But if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that objectivity is a scam designed to uplift one particular point of view at the expense of everyone else. A person can afford to be neutral when they’re part of the majority or seen as the default. They don’t have any skin in the game. They can dip into a hypothetical and reduce things down to mere ideas and processes, then exit and continue on with their lives. It’s Silicon Valley descending to run tests in a town and then leaving the wreckage behind. Forrest suffers consequences, but at the end of the day he can still walk away relatively unscathed. Others may not fare so well. Forrest may try to live as though nothing matters, but the real world will always bleed into things, no matter how much editing or framing you do. 

Devan Suber is a writer living in Philadelphia.