'Chelsea Does' Review: Chelsea Handler Overload
Do you like Chelsea Handler? I mean her comic persona, the way she presents herself as an aggressively pushy, opinionated, non-stop talker about, most of the time, herself? If you do, you’ll love Chelsea Does, a series of four documentaries premiering on Netflix on Saturday.
For me, honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it through the first episode, “Chelsea Does Marriage.” (The other things Chelsea “does” are race, Silicon Valley, and drugs.) Anyone with a passing knowledge of Handler knows she’s not a fan of marriage, and the hour consists of her talking to various people in the marriage industry — matchmakers, dress sellers, wedding planners, the head of infidelity website Ashley Madison — and submitting them to her scorn.
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Handler belittles everyone she encounters. Sometimes, inevitably, I agreed with her — the comedian dislikes so much, there’s bound to be overlap, and I shared her appalled reaction to the jargon-babbling matchmaking couple she interviewed, and her dismay at how expensive and ugly so many wedding dresses are. But rarely is this contempt of hers funny. There are excruciating sessions pitting Chelsea with children, asking them their opinions about marriage. It’s supposed to be cute in a Kids Say The Darnedest Things way, but all that comes across is Handler’s well-known dislike of children.
The entire series is framed by discussions that Handler has at the start of each episode with her friends, who include Mary McCormack (In Plain Sight), Khloe Kardashian, and Leah Remini. Except for McCormack, who comes across as beacon of common sense — truly, I would much rather watch a series called Mary Does — all the celeb buddy-buddy stuff is excruciating.
“Chelsea Does Race” is a bit better than “Marriage,” if only because Handler has to tone it down and clam up once in a while as a black or Asian person patiently explains what is racist about this or that cultural cliché or assumption.
The best of the series is “Chelsea Does Silicon Valley,” perhaps because I share some of Handler’s frustration with technology that is supposed to make our lives easier but just ends up being difficult to use. Handler presents herself as a techno-illiterate, which helps keep her rampant, supposedly-comic-but-not-really self-centeredness in check. And she exacts a certain amount of revenge that is satisfying to watch: Much of the technology that Silicon Valley bigwigs demonstrate for her — from Skype to robots — fails to work on-camera (“Most things don’t work,” she says with truth), and Handler comes up with an app that truly seems to interest the Valley moguls to whom she pitches it.
I found the series irritating because I find Handler funny very rarely. If you’re a fan, you’ll have a great time, because what this series should be called is Chelsea Does Chelsea.
Chelsea Does is streaming now on Netflix.
