"Roy" is a strange series about stars in which Billie Eilish leads a cult

On March 17, the first season of The Swarm premiered on Amazon Prime Video. The showrunner of the project was Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino. His first series, Atlanta, focused on the music industry. Roy continues this theme.

Young girl Dre is crazy about Nija, a pop star who has a huge army of fans. Fans call themselves a swarm: how bees, they are ready to attack anyone who insults the singer. Dre's life changes after her sister Melissa commits suicide due to a fight with her boyfriend. Dre kills him and gets a taste: she starts hunting for people who write nasty things about Naija.

Standard modern horror

If you label Roy with a genre, then you have to call it horror. The series looks like it was directed by Jordan Peele. "Roy" is not devoid of humor: each of Dre's brutal murders is funny and a little ridiculous. She is not smart and strong enough to perform her tasks perfectly. Fortunately for the main character, those around her are too stupid to suspect her of the murders.

As is typical modern horror, "Roy" is full of social criticism. Various trends are mentioned - from bullying on the Internet to racism. But almost all attention goes to the cult of stars.

Dre is a fan of Niji. Nija's husband is a superstar rapper, and his sister also sings. The singer is fictional, but it is quite clear that Beyoncé served as her prototype. It's funny that the series begins with a warning that all events and characters are real - reminds the introduction "Fargo».

Despite the fact that "Roy" satirizes the cult of stars, the producers have not abandoned the classic marketing techniques. Billy Eilish and Michael Jackson's daughter appear in episodic roles, and Barack Obama's daughter worked on the script for one of the episodes.

Strange format

Dre travels the US stalking Naija's enemies. Episodes are separated from each other not only by the place of action, but also by time. It turns out a certain set of stories of a serial killer - in the spirit of "The House That Jack Built". True, there is no voice-over that connects the individual episodes.

In part, the format also resembles Atlanta, more precisely the third and fourth seasons, in which the general plot faded into the background, giving way to individual sketches. There is a main character and her obsession, everything else changes from episode to episode.

On the one hand, the format gave more freedom to the authors - you can show hipsters from Seattle, and hippies from Los Angeles, and provincials from Houston. On the other hand, the characters that the writers came up with could fit in one city.

Empty characters

The main character turned out to be completely empty of content because of her obsession. She speaks in quotes from the songs of her favorite singer, using them as arguments for any dispute. Because of this, her small (Dre is generally laconic) discussions on the topic of racism or feminism are too superficial.

It's sad that all the other heroes came out the same empty. They appear on the screen, demonstrate a couple of stereotypes and disappear. They cannot be justified by the fact that they are obsessed - rather, they are ordinary people, they just did not interest the scriptwriters. Sometimes it feels like Glover pulled out discarded drafts of Atlanta and borrowed characters from them. Whether it's rich white baseball players or dark-skinned loud-mouthed strippers - they are too reminiscent of the heroes of "Atlanta".

This can be doubted exactly until "Roy" begins to simply repeat the successful jokes from Glover's past series. A white stripper who considers herself black is literally a repeat of one of Atlanta's best jokes (where a black teenager identified himself as a 35-year-old white worker at a Coca-Cola plant). A couple of episodes later, crazy feminists are cultivating their garden in almost the same locations as the heroines of the third season of Atlanta. True, now they leads Billy Eilish.

Tight timing

Even though the episodes are short (about half an hour on average), they feel drawn out. For the first 5-6 minutes, the characters that Dre will interact with are shown, and then nothing happens. As a rule, 5 minutes before the end of the episode, Dre kills someone, and then disappears from the scene of the crime.

In theory, the gap between the plot and the denouement could be filled with jokes - according to this formula, the last two seasons of Atlanta were built, but the Roy is not replete with humor.

Already by the fourth series, close-ups with Dre begin to bother - there are indecently many of them, especially considering that Dre rarely shows emotions.

Perhaps if 7 episodes were squeezed into a 100-minute film, the story would look more dynamic. True, the chosen style of narration would have to be abandoned, since it is necessary to combine stories into something whole.

If you really like Jordan Peele films, then you will like The Swarm. If you really love the latest seasons of Atlanta, then you will most likely like The Roy. And if you are a neutral viewer who is looking for an interesting comedy for the evening, then "Roy" will get bored by the third episode. Donald Glover came up with a great storyline, but the implementation failed - it turned out to be an insipid series.