American Vandal’s Season 2 Trailer Is About More Than Just The Poop

“What if the motive is just… poop is funny?”

Poop is funny.

Late last year, Netflix demonstrated a surprising amount of good humored self-awareness when it released American Vandal, a parody of the recent rash of true crime murder documentaries, not least of all its own phenomenon Making a Murderer.

The show began as a pitch-perfect sendup of the genre, a tonally and stylistically flawless recreation transposed into a high school and investigating a wonderfully silly question: Who spray painted dicks on the cars in the teachers’ parking lot?

But the first episode, while brilliant, inspired another very justified question: Could this one joke support the show for an entire season?

The answer, it turned out, was yes, as the subsequent seven episodes spun out a remarkable meditation on the influence of outside scrutiny, both through the documentarian’s lens and the judgment of teachers, peers, and society at large. It also managed to present a genuinely engaging mystery in which the lives of filmmaker Peter Maldonado and suspect Dylan Maxwell (inimitably played by Jimmy Tatro) become embroiled. By the end, Dylan was more than a stoner goofball, Peter was more than an adolescent Sarah Koenig wannabe, and the question of who drew the dicks was both more and less important than ever.

What began as a hilarious but one-note joke became an astoundingly deep work of art.

Here’s hoping American Vandal can subvert expectations again, because the second season is nearly upon us. The release date is set for September 14, and the trailer just dropped on Tuesday. Here it is:

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