Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later – Season 1 Review

Wet Hot American Summer

The creators of Wet Hot American Summer are really milking this thing, aren’t they. The First Day of Camp prequel alone was hardly necessary back in 2015. To be fair, however, that ended up being a really funny season of TV. I’m not even a fan of the original movie, but First Day of Camp proved that you could successfully bring an ensemble back together years later in ways that Arrested Development’s Season 4 failed to. First Day of Camp was clearly an anomaly, though, because Ten Years Later is the kind of flop you would expect when resurrecting past properties.

One of the big jokes in First Day of Camp was that these actors were playing younger versions of themselves, but in Ten Years Later, that doesn’t quite work anymore. The characters are older, and the actors are (significantly) older. They couldn’t even get Bradley Cooper to make a brief cameo in this one, but instead of writing his character off, they replaced him with Adam Scott, who’s also not in it that much. It’s impressive the talent they brought in, but given everyone’s obviously busy schedules, the show is less an ensemble and more a series of unrelated “where are they now” vignettes.

What’s even stranger is that they shoehorned in two new characters who weren’t in the original movie or prequel and then spent a huge amount of time with these people we have no reason to care about. Their love triangle isn’t interesting. Coop’s new love triangle isn’t interesting. Hell, none of the side stories are interesting. It all feels so… pointless. It’s just snippets of, “Hey, remember this? Hey, remember her?” with the very occasional, actually funny joke. While those few good jokes did make me laugh, the season as a whole simply didn’t need to exist and sours the goodwill First Day of Camp generated.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.