Tom Segura’s Rude, Crude Netflix Comedy Series

In the first minutes of Netflix’s Bad Thoughts, creator and star Tom Segura explains what it’s like being a comedian. “You know that dumb shit you get sent to HR for saying?” he smirks. “I get paid for that.”

He’s elucidating the broad theme of the episode — “jobs” — but really, he could be explaining his series as a whole. And his promise (or threat) is not an idle one. Bad Thoughts’ entire raison d’être is pushing past the boundaries of good taste, in hopes of provoking delighted horror or disgust. How successful you think Segura is at it, and whether you think it’s a worthy goal to begin with, is a matter of personal sensibility. I will say this: You can’t accuse the guy of not committing to a bit.

In interviews, Segura has compared Bad Thoughts to Twilight Zone or a “dark, comedic version of Black Mirror.” It’d probably be more straightforwardly described as a sketch show à la I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson, though one understands why a comedian wouldn’t want to evoke other comedians’ projects so directly. Each of its six installments is broken up into two or three segments, the last of which is usually the first half of a two-parter — all the better to encourage a viewer to let Netflix’s autoplay feature do its thing. The whole thing comes in at 114 minutes including credits, or less than one weekly drop of Disney+’s Andor.

It helps the time fly by that despite Segura’s description of the show as “dark,” it … isn’t, really. Inappropriate, gross, occasionally violent and frequently sexually explicit, yes. (None of which, again, are necessarily cause for complaint if that’s your cup of tea.) But dark? I suppose it depends on your definition.

You will see a man (Segura) shit his pants. You will see a different man (The Sopranos’ Robert Iler) shit into a toilet while sitting on the lap of another guy (Kirk Fox). You will watch a dude get rimmed by a senior citizen, and one having sex with a repulsive monster, and yet another getting handed an axe to chop his own penis off. (All the men in that sentence are played by Segura, though Bad Thoughts does pull in some fun guest stars like Dan Stevens, Shea Whigham and Rachel Bloom.) You will not see much that actually feels twisted enough to shock or bruise, or at least I didn’t.

The form these stories take varies from segment to segment: post-apocalyptic horror, sexy foreign film, bonus feature for some straight-to-DVD Steven Seagal atrocity. The sendups aren’t always as precise as they could be — would “A25” be the studio behind a Patch Adams-style cheesefest about a janitor who touches people both literally and metaphorically? But Segura and his co-directors, Rami Hachache and Jeremy Konner, nail the details that really matter. The James Bond-type thriller sendup that opens the series is pretty good. The exact sound of the plop when the spy drops his soiled pants on the ground is perfect.

While the genres and styles range widely, the most persistently recurring themes are obvious and bro-y. (As you’d perhaps expect from a comic known for, among other things, being a recurring guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.) One is a fixation on what people are or aren’t “allowed” to say. Bad Thoughts thankfully avoids the very smarmiest of anti-“cancel culture” posturing, but it can’t resist looking for ways to have its cake and eat it too. Sure, a racist war tale might be unacceptable for public consumption. But what if it’s coming from a little boy? What if the boy is reciting it at a school assembly, as a tribute to his beloved grandfather (Segura)? What if Segura also casts himself as the boy’s horrified father? Is it okay to laugh now?

The other, even more prominent theme is sexual humiliation. If Bad Thoughts is meant to provide a window into Segura’s most twisted ideas, he apparently cannot stop dreaming up scenarios in which a man is forced to submit to sexual situations he really, really would rather not be in — whether it’s because the lady he really wants to screw has made him promise to bone another, more repulsive woman first, or because his wife’s dying wish is to sleep with a strapping stranger, or because he’d still rather get naked with a guy he just met than face members of the public affronted by the language in his standup specials. (There’s that theme again.)

As punchlines go, “Are you offended?” and “Ew, gross sex” do not strike me as particularly novel or outrageous. But Bad Thoughts does milk extra humor from doubling and tripling down on some of those. The three-chapter “Cyrus” gets funnier every time the series returns to it not because the jokes are necessarily more inspired, but because Segura keeps coming up with ever-crazier twists to link them all together. Another single-segment sketch takes the stereotypically male dream of having a really big dick and then escalates it to surreal proportions; the thrill is in seeing how far he’ll take the gag and then, when he cannot take it any further, how he’ll work his way back out of it.

My hands-down favorite piece, though, is one that takes Segura’s impish humor in another direction entirely. “Rex Henley” is a two-parter about a down-home country singer who gets so rich and famous he grows completely out of touch with his fanbase, and then goes to absurdly violent lengths to get his mojo back. I don’t know Segura, so I don’t know if this is a real fear of his. But it certainly feels like one that could speak to the private anxieties of a guy successful enough to have five Netflix specials, his own podcasting empire and now his own Netflix comedy series.

Unlike with, say, an extended fantasy about punishing a barista for getting a very simple drink order wrong, there’s nothing even plausibly relatable about the concept. Nor does Segura pretend otherwise. He casts himself as the unhinged and unpredictable villain while Daniella Pineda plays the final girl. But if the concept is too hilariously specific to be as universal as the strains of potty humor, filthy words and sexual mortification running through most of the rest of the series, that’s also what makes it so intriguing. It’s one of the few moments in Bad Thoughts that feel like you’re peering into someone’s personal bad thoughts, rather than some broadly familiar id.