While searching for silly distractions on Cracked’s YouTube channel a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across a video called “Why Speed Dating Is Terrible.” I spent the next ten minutes of my life watching incredibly loquacious (and occasionally foul-mouthed) animated characters pick apart themselves, each other, and the social institutions of romance and dating.
The premise of the video is that a woman has decided to be “as specific as possible” about herself in order to speed up the speed-dating process even more than usual. It was equal parts hilarious and super interesting. And, to my delight, it was the first in a series called People Watching, written, directed, and illustrated by webcomic-artist Winston Rowntree.
At the time of writing, People Watching has been running for a month, has four episodes, and has proven itself to be unafraid of confronting tough topics, including depression and death. The characters have next to no filter, and so everything they talk about is discussed frankly. They also speak very quickly, packing a lot of dialogue into a very short amount of time, which for me both contributes to the humor and reminds me of my real-life friends. Though the People Watching cast is a bit meaner than anyone I’d like to hang out with, my friends and I too spend a lot of time sitting around talking very quickly about serious things, bouncing ideas and philosophies off of each other until we reach a conclusion more profound than any thought we’d come to the table with – and every People Watching episode ends with a moment like that, in which my “Haha, that’s funny” and “Hmm, that’s interesting” reactions give way for an “Oh, wow.”
(Caution, dear reader, there are mild spoilers ahead for the “Why Non Religious Confessionals Should Be a Thing” episode).
The characters of People Watching are quirky and complicated. They’re thoughtful sometimes and pathetic other times. They’re nice sometimes, and other times – especially in the episode with the confessional – they say really awful things about themselves and others. And in all of this, they are very real. As the show’s teaser trailer says, “People are interesting, dualistic, and contradictory, always and never alone, good and bad and crazy.”
They have worries and defense mechanisms, and they fret that no one else experiences the world like they do. The big question at the end of the confessional episode is, “Is that normal?” And the answer is yes. Other people are like that. No one is totally unique or alone, even at their worst. But the things that the people in People Watching worry about, just like in real life, are things that it’s generally frowned upon to talk about – which is why I think that this show is so important. It removes the filters and discusses the ugly truths of life, from multiple angles. For example, the show depicts both the struggles of people with depression (here) and the struggles of people who don’t know how to understand or help their friends with depression (there). It tells both kinds of people, “Yes, you are not alone in that struggle.” And knowing that someone else has felt the same way about something or had the same problem as you, is not only reassuring but empowering. It’s easier to face the world and the things about it that scare you when you know you’re not alone in being afraid.
