In the Purge, American Fascism Is Stupid and Boring.

That Seems About Right.

The Purge series on NBC is not what you'd call great television. The characters—an ex-marine trying to rescue his sister, an upwardly mobile couple caught in a love triangle, an ambitious career woman stalled on the corporate ladder—are familiar and not especially engaging. The plot meanders, struggling to spin itself out to ten episodes. The effects and choreography are by the numbers. This is not Game of Thrones, by any stretch. It's not even Walking Dead.

While the Purge isn't going to win any Emmys, though, its very mediocrity does pack a certain, queasy chill. "On Purge night America lives up to its promise," a voiceover declares—and the plodding unpleasantness on the screen suggests that that promise isn't so great. The Purge is about the American dream gone awry, and there's something fitting about having that dream be not just evil and awful, but half-assed.

The Purge film franchise, which inspired the TV show, was low-budget and skuzzy, but with feeling. The series is set in a near future dystopia in which the government has been taken over by a quasi fundamentalist conservative party called the New Founding Fathers of America. To distract from economic and social problems, the NFFA has instituted a yearly Purge, in which all laws are suspended for a night and people are encouraged to murder each other in order to exorcize their violent impulses.

As the franchise has gone on, it's become more and more explicit in its condemnation of the pathologies of the American right. The First Purge, from 2018, went full anti-fascist. It revealed that the NFFA paid thugs during the Purge to kill the poor and wipe out surplus population. It also included images of people dressed up in KKK hoods, Nazi outfits, and police uniforms terrorizing people of color.

Each Purge film occurs during a single Purge night, and each vividly depicts a world suddenly and swiftly descending into violence. America during the Purge tears off its rational, noble mask, and reveals a blank hole of hatred. "It's my right to Purge," mostly well off, mostly white people declare before going off to shoot the homeless or murder people of color. The films aren’t high budget affairs, but they each depict slavering American exceptionalism embracing madness with a vivid red rush.

The TV show doesn't have that red rush. Instead, it has a reddish meander. Having three storylines and seven to eight hours to watch them slowly unfold vitiates a lot of the urgency of the movies. Instead of presenting escalating fascist nightmare of violence, the television series strolls around, bumping into extraneous melodrama, repeating plot points, and generally failing to create much suspense about the fate of its unmemorable characters.

The lack of urgency does have its own chilling familiarity in our current political climate, though. On-screen dystopias are often depicted as being in a kind of constant crisis. Hulu's Handmaid's Tale, for example, carefully cultivates an atmosphere of constant stress, sadness, and quiet threat, which can be almost unendurable to watch. Its fascist theocracy is a vivid, ever present nightmare.

The Purge televison series isn't like that. Instead, it keeps getting distracted by exploitation nonsense. There are several soft-focus PG-13 lesbian sex scenes which are so obviously unnecessary they're virtually a punch line. A bunch of random fight sequences lead nowhere; a staged gladiatorial gauntlet is particularly gratuitous, especially since the protagonist's arrow wound is instantly and improbably forgotten. A plotline involving corporate drones closing an important deal is perhaps the show's nadir. Surely no one is tuning into the Purge to watch people shuffle paper and deliver business pep talks.

The show, in short, manages to make fascist apocalypse boring and stupid—which is kind of profound. As Hannah Arendt famously said, evil is often banal. It happens while people go on with their lives, chasing a promotion or falling out of love with their husband.

The best moment in the first few episodes is a conversation between corporate exec Jane (Amanda Warren) and the incredibly buff assassin she's hired to off her boss during the purge. The two are walking together, and Jane is babbling nervously and endlessly about why she's decided to off her superior, talking in generalities about being passed over for advancement. Her nervous recitation goes on seemingly forever, with the assassin speaking for all of us viewers when she tells Jane, over and over, that no one cares. And then, Jane announces, out of the blue, "It's my right to Purge." Propaganda worms its way into personal self-justification, and suddenly the state's advertising jingle for hatred has become your personal motto. Then the moment passes, without remark, and you go back to boring your peers.

Well-made television series and films present evil as dramatic, focused, purposeful, and meaningful. In the Purge, in contrast, evil's unmotivated and dumb as a post. Which seems appropriate for a timeline in which White House staff sneaks paperwork off the presidential toddler's desk to keep him from signing something catastrophic.

The Purge presents an America in which fascism and cruelty are smaller and stupider than life. A NFFA leader casually declares he never pays taxes, shoots a subordinate in the head, and then the plot strolls off to explore the marital troubles of the onlookers. Horrible things happen, injustice rolls on, and we can barely manage to care for a couple of minutes before getting distracted. "The Purge is America," the show insists. That could mean that America is violent, arbitrary and fascist. But it could also mean that America is bad television. The Purge makes a convincing case for both.

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I wrote this back in 2018, but like a lot of Trump-era nattering, it’s sadly relevant again. Trump 2.0 is still nightmare as poorly plotted farce; a seemingly endless horror of petty tedium and poorly plotted brutality. The Purge, like most dystopias at the moment, can’t really compete.