This is a dialogue piece, and Cheadle and Tyler are pitch perfect voicing the "now" scenes. It does have to be noted though that Aisha Tyler has lived life in the fast lane and it's apparent in her voice - she can't play "before" younger roles credibly any more.
John DiMaggio is always good value, but here he's just phoning in King Zog. It's a solid performance, but nothing we haven't heard before, a lot.
The young Somali Rose does a very decent job with what she's told to say, and here's where we run into the big problem: making her say the lines that she's given is child abuse. No nuance, no excuses, no contextualising it away, this is an industry that sacrifices childhood innocence in the pursuit of profit.
I focus on all this because there's really not much else to talk about. The plot is absolutely wafer thin and barely worth discussing, and the characters are pure tropes. So this is all about the dialogue.
Granted, Tyler did write some amusing lines, and I chuckled a few times at the adult performances before it all went sour.
But was it worth corrupting a young child in order to make her deliver similar cynical, hateful dialogue? Is degeneracy amusing?
No, I really don't think that it is. It's not shocking, it's just appalling.
Poor show, Tyler, in many ways. Despite the jokes she wrote about it here, the real child abuser in this production is herself.
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