The World is Wrong, Volume 4: At Home With Amy Sedaris

The hipster darling that should-have-been

In 2010, a Jezebel article ripped The Daily Show a new asshole — or “ripped The Daily Show a new cervix”, as Jezebel might put it — for not employing enough women. This was a seismic event in the comedy world; networks vowed to hire more women, and New York went so far as to develop a tax credit for productions that hire women. It also became culturally taboo to dislike female-created things, as I discovered when I told friends that I didn’t like the movie Ladybird and was treated as if I had asked them to sign a petition legalizing bestiality.

The genre-wide movement to support, up-vote, and generally be favorable to female-created things makes this installment of “The World Is Wrong” extra baffling. At Home with Amy Sedaris was co-created by a woman, starred a woman, had a woman-heavy writing staff, was hilarious, and had less cultural impact than Burger King’s “angry whopper”. The show aired on TruTV for three seasons in the late 2010s and then was quietly cancelled. I get why At Home didn’t become a broad-based hit — it’s an alt-comedy quirk fest — but I’ll never understand why it didn’t become a show that makes identity-obsessed progressives performatively cream their jeans, like Hacks or The Bear.

The starting point of At Home is lifestyle TV shows, like Martha Stewart Living. These shows star an impossibly perfect woman who gently informs you that you live like utter trash…but who also gives you the skills to drag yourself out of your disgusting pig-person existence. They show you how to cook and decorate and make your home so motherfucking pleasant that your friends will explode with jealousy. These are the shows that made you feel bad about yourself before Instagram took presenting a highly cultivated and utterly impossible lifestyle to the next level.

The main joke on At Home is that the host never shows you how to do anything. Sedaris will do a sketch featuring Richard Kind in a bear outfit or Bridget Everett as a waitress for “Honkers” restaurant and at the end say “Oh yeah…here’s a cocktail recipe.” Of course, the homemaking tips are close to nonexistent because At Home is a comedy show. Comedy has a problem where just being funny is often considered not enough; there has to be commentary or emotional weight or some other ingredient. And to be clear, it’s my genre, political comedy, that’s most of the problem; “comedy with a point” has morphed into “commentary with a few jokes tossed in,” so much so that purely-funny shows like At Home seem almost retro.

And speaking of retro: At Home has a decidedly ‘50s aesthetic, even though it doesn’t take place in the ‘50s. In much the same way that South Park never explained how Kenny would die and then be perfectly fine in the next episode, At Home never explains why Amy is surrounded by cathode-ray tube televisions and June Cleaver’s kitchen appliances. This is one of a million quirky choices that seems designed to delight comedy nerds and scare away normies. At Home often feels like the good version of a mid-2000s sketch show in Brooklyn, and guest appearances from people like Nick Kroll, Fred Armisen, Ellie Kemper, and Brian Stack leave no doubt about the show’s sensibilities. I wouldn’t be shocked if the pitch for the show was: “It’s a Dana Carvey Show/The Critic-type show that no-one will watch but that will be remembered fondly by comedy nerds for decades to come!”

What does shock me is that — as far as I can tell — a cult following for the show never developed. The show got good reviews, though not as good as female-led cable comedy shows of the time like A Black Lady Sketch Show and Full Frontal with Sam Bee, even though I will humbly suggest that anyone who thinks that either of those shows is funnier than At Home should be chemically castrated. At Home kept getting beaten for an Emmy by Saturday Night Live, though it did beat out The Amber Ruffin Show and How To with John Wilson for a Writers Guild Award in 2021. I tried to find a Reddit page dedicated to the show and the first one that came up is one called “Watched At Home With Amy Sedaris, and I’m not sure I get it?”, which seems about right. And maybe I’m running in the wrong circles, but I don’t hear much chatter about this show from other comics, even though my friends talk about Sedaris’ earlier show — Strangers with Candy — in terms more glowing than evangelical Christians use to talk about Jesus Christ.

My first theory about what went wrong is simply TruTV…do people even know that’s a network? It used to be Court TV, then it switched to comedy in the 2010s, which is like pivoting to beeper sales in the late ‘90s. The Occam’s razor explanation for At Home’s quiet death is that it got caught in the Jonestown-level massacre of basic cable original content in the 2010s. But why no cult following? Why am I not inundated with social media posts from the cool kids about this show’s brilliance, especially since it happened at a moment when you had to pretend that Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling are Shakespeare-level geniuses in order to #SupportWomen? I don’t know. Maybe the show’s sensibility was to Gen X/Old Millenial for the 20-something tastemakers of the time, or maybe those same tastemakers don’t actually like comedy (which would explain their love for non-comedy “comedies” like The Bear). Or maybe the show is big in some comedy circles, and my friends just suck. I don’t know.

The show’s legacy might end up being Cole Escola, who played Amy’s deeply-antisocial friend Cassie Tucker. Cole went on to write and star in a hit off-Broadway play called Oh, Mary! — a comedy loosely about Mary Todd Lincoln — and is on Time’s “100 Next” list of about-to-be-influential stars. So, the world has found Cole Escola, which is good, because Cole has been funny for a while. It might not be accurate to say that At Home “launched” Cole, because four years passed between At Home’s cancellation and Oh, Mary!, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt.

If At Home died because streaming killed cable, the irony is that streaming gives the show a chance to be revived. It’s possible that Netflix’s impending purchase of Warner Bros., which owns TruTV, will result in the show ending up on Netflix. Streaming doesn’t kill shows so much as imprison them in carbonite to possibly be revived at a later date, so that could still happen. And that means that the identity-obsessed hipsters who are normally dying to tell you how much they love this or that female-led thing still have a chance to get it right.

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