The Extremists

The Extremists begins earnestly enough, as a parody of American talk-shows. Two blustering, hyperbolic talking heads chatter about The Extremist Threat with the usual array of buzzwords, logical fallacies and jingoistic scaremongering. But around the half-hour mark, CJ Hopkins’ new script comes unhinged; before our eyes, it metamorphosises into an existential exploration of mass media manipulation, political spin and the subconscious programming of the masses. Suddenly, a simple satire becomes a Beckettian philosophical rant, the erratic cadence of the two actors’ speech an extended metaphor for the 24-hour chatter of the television set.

All of which would be fine, if it wasn’t both so unbearably dense and unutterably devoid of substance. As political satire, it’s dumb and superficial: a blunt instrument beating the audience around the head with the idiocy of rolling news and professional punditry. Like a high school homage to Wag the Dog and Network, the two cartoonish commentators deliver witless soundbites in a pastiche which is as intellectually cheap as it is patronising to the viewer.

The basic premise, smugly delivered, is that Americans are dumb and The Man wants to control our thoughts through the television set. It’s a sophomoric form of argument which places The Extremists into the worst category of pseudo-provocative political theatre. The writing is so crushingly pretentious that even a creditably dynamic two-person cast can’t drag meaning out of the mire. By the time they get around to the clumsy transition into the show’s more philosophically expository second act, The Extremists becomes what it set out to mock: white noise.