Weird City lives up to its name. It’s set in a city and it’s weird.
The half-hour anthology series, premiering Wednesday on the streaming service YouTube Premium, sets a series of stories in the future city of Weird, where life for humans is quite different than we know it today and humans are pretty much exactly the same.
The culture has progressed, if that’s the right word, to the point where the Haves and Have-Nots live in two separate places.
They’re all still residents of Weird, but there’s a physical barrier that divides the city into Above the Line and Below the Line.
Above the Line, life is sweet. Below the Line, life is more hardscrabble. People from Above the Line can travel into the proletarian world of Below the Line if they choose, though most see no reason they ever would. People from Below the Line are expected to stay where they are.
The concept of a world where the elite have distanced themselves from the distasteful unwashed masses is hardly unique to Weird City. From dark dramas like The Man in the High Castle and The Hunger Games to offbeat sitcoms like this one, writers have long seen this sort of dystopian future as fertile turf.
It doesn’t hurt that we hear real-life warnings all the time about the dangers of a society where a handful of people have it all and hard-working “ordinary” people who didn’t win the birth lottery get only blood, toil, sweat and tears.
Weird City takes a slightly different angle on the issue – not exactly bemused, but looking at the absurdities and imagining how this situation would affect individuals in particular situations.
The first episode focuses on Stu (Dylan O’Brien, top), who was brought up Below the Line and whose mother struck it rich and got them upgraded to Above the Line. So Stu is now in clover, but he didn’t get the perks enjoyed by lifelong residents, like having his perfect mate assigned to him by Weird’s advanced technology.
All Above the Line people get that perfect mate assignment, freeing them from the whole entanglement of dating and searching. So Stu’s friends are happily ensconced in blissful marriages and Stu is still looking.
Happily for him, Above the Line offers a matchmaking service, so Stu drops in and is informed that his perfect One will arrive at his house at midnight.
Come 12:15 a.m., enter Bert (Ed O’Neill, above, with O'Brien). Stu and Bert agree this is a mistake, but they’re cordial about it, so they go out for a snack at Al’s Diner in Below the Line, which they discover is the favorite place of both.
It should be noted that all along this path they run into absurd futuristic people, situations and technology, as well as countless amusing pretensions in the Above the Line world.
Next time you’re at the bar in Above the Line, for instance, you might want to order the Pumpkin Saffron Double Triple Super.
Weird City mixes a fair amount of millennial humor in with eye-rolling over the capability of future technology and the annoying tics of the entitled class.
The result isn’t the smoothest storytelling ever, but a decent amount of fun – and the repertory structure brings in a cast that includes Sara Gilbert, Mark Hamill, Rosario Dawson, LeVar Burton (above), Yvette Nicole Brown, Laverne Cox and more. In the end, Weird City comes in above the line.