Jason Segel behind and above the curtain for his first tv shows as author

About 10 years ago AMC had become a kind of golden goose. Within a few years it had managed to churn out 2 masterpieces like Mad Men and Breaking Bad and a product like The Walking Dead that, for better or worse, has left its mark on the contemporary serial landscape.

We had started talking about AMC method at a certain point, a method that AMC itself would not have been able to apply, with a series of failures and mediocre products that prevented the U.S. cable TV to approach HBO.

The consequence has been that in the last 3-4 years AMC products are no longer so expected and around them the interest is quite lukewarm.

In the almost general indifference the beginning of 2020 has given us a TV series that, although not comparable with its illustrious predecessors, does not leave us indifferent.

Dispatches From Elsewhere is a difficult series to frame, constantly hovering on a thin line between "meh" and "wow".

Written, directed and recited by Jason Segel, the Marshall of How I Met Your Mother, the series reaps much less than it sows, receiving a lot of flattery and a lot of "buts", some criticism and little exaltation.

Dispatches From Elsewhere is a sort of Fight Club more colorful, positive, current, good and even a bit goodistic.

The main protagonists are 4:

Peter (Jason Segel) is a boy plunged into a monotony now paralyzing. He alternates between a work, static and without bite, and his melancholy and bare apartment.

Simone (Eve Lendley) is a transgender girl, reluctant towards the world, extremely insecure about herself and afraid of relationships.

Fredwynn (Andre 3000) is a rich and brilliant analyst, obsessed with data, numbers and conspiracies, which keep him at a distance from the joys of life.

Janice (Sally Field) is an old lady who, having arrived at the end of her life, broods over a happy but different past than she would have imagined.

Peter, Simone, Fredwynn and Janice are us.

In the continuous demolition of the fourth wall, the spectator is "assimilated" to the protagonists.

Each episode opens with the description of the life of one of the characters, usually flat and without a precise purpose, and with the indication, the rhetorical question that is asked to us spectators: "Janice is you if", "Peter is you if" and so on.

This ploy allows us to enter into perfect harmony with the series itself and its characters, immersing ourselves, little or much, with each of them.

The empathic component is very strong in the series but it could not hold up only thanks to this link created very effectively with the audience.

The interest is kept high thanks to a real game in which the 4 strangers will participate.

It is an initiative, a flash mob that will lead to the creation of teams that will have to follow clues, scattered around the city. These clues will be small pieces within a large wall that will divide, or rather confuse, 2 opposite factions:

The Jejeune Institute and the Elsewhere society.

The first is, simplifying, the dark part, represents the evil that afflicts society. A corporation that has profit as God and money as its means and end. It is opposed to an Elsewhere Society that professes a utopian, kinder, more inclusive, more "awake" world.

The narrating voice of Octavio, charismatic character and voice over double (it is both for the spectator and for the protagonists in many cases), acts as a guide within this labyrinthine game.

It's a pretentious game that, through various challenges, tries to awaken the pride of men and women now dormant in a long self-imposed hibernation.

In the background we can see an always solid denunciation to today's society, something not new in the serial panorama, which stands out for a strong critical/self-critical component towards the individual.

It is no coincidence if it is the lives of individual characters to be put under the magnifying glass.

A way to say that, if it is true that society in 2020 does not help us to be free and sunny, we are still the ones who have the last word on our lives.

The various activities of the game serve precisely to put Peter, Simone, Fredwynn and Janice in front of their anxieties, fears and contradictions.

Will Peter be able to escape from his cave and see the light?

Will Simone be able to fall in love without feeling inadequate?

Will Fredwynn let go of the emotional component?

Will Janice put herself on the line now that she has nothing more to lose?

It's a collective psychological and social experiment that seems to have as its ultimate goal to awaken us and find our "Divine Nonchalance", an attribute missing in our cyborg lives and that would allow us, if found, to live a more carefree, fun life, makes us feel like we're not in love anymore.

But can you find Nonchalance on your own?

Perhaps one of the mistakes of contemporary man has been to feel stronger if alone.

The very fact that Dispatches From Elsewhere is the story of Fredwynn, Peter, Simone and Janice and not the story of Peter alone, although his character is more loaded with expectations and narrative weight, makes us realize that one of the things that the series wants to demonstrate irrefutably is the strength of the group.

One must dissolve one's prejudices and tighten more ties.

It is a banal teaching that the protagonists learn along a path that will take them from being unknown to being indispensable and at the same time independent.

You will create that virtuous mechanism that you can be good for others only when you can find yourself.

Dispatches From Elsewhere, like its protagonists, stumbles several times along the road, stumbling in many places, stumbling like a boxer played in others.

This is her main flaw, the one that has not allowed her to take flight.

In her defense, it must be said that the plot is not linear, it does not lend itself to classical reasoning so that from point A you get to point B in a lucid, surgical way.

It is not in the strings or in the interest of the series to develop in this way.

Sometimes it struggles, generating some confusion in a spectator in search of the answer to the great mystery behind the feud between Jejeune Institute and Elsewhere Society.

The beautiful and estranging ending brings us back to the plot of a great film of a few years ago starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. The film was Synecdoche, New York, and one has to imagine that Jason Segel was struck by it.

The surrealism, the very marked methanarration, the obsession for the clues scattered here and there, the superimposition of the protagonist of the series with the author of the series itself, are all characteristics that are fully realized in that wonderful film.

To fully appreciate this parallelism we must enjoy the entire final episode, exciting and capable of an epiphanic progression towards a very relative truth and therefore very free from any misunderstanding.

We are the protagonists of our story.

This does not mean that we are forced to stage it, to plan it in detail, to wait for a destiny that we have foreshadowed.

It is more likely, as Dispatches Elsewhere suggests, that it is only the acceptance of the self that makes us free, free to write our story with an ever-changing ink, on an ever-changing canvas, part of a larger mosaic, made of our history but also of the stories of others, composed of our joys but also of those of others, of our own griefs and sorrows, of the griefs and sorrows of others.

Our ability to be shoulders to cry on and faces to sit on the shoulders of others, to share important moments, to include rather than exclude, will make us authors of a novel, a film, a series worthy of being written, worthy of being handed down.

Perhaps this is the Divine Nonchalance that Clara praised?

Plot: 6,5
Character Development: 8
Complexity: 7
Originality: 7.5
Cast: 7
Impact on contemporary seriality: 6.5
Technical department: 7
Direction: 7
Entertainment: 7.5
Emotional Involvement: 8
Soundtrack: 6.5