The Banality of Blasphemy

The cast of Your Friends and Neighbors ((L-R) Lena Hall, Donovan Colan, Isabel Gravitt, Aimee Carrero, Amanda Peet, Jon Hamm, Olivia Munn, Mark Tallman, Eunice Bae, Anna Osceola, and Hoon Lee attend Apple TV+'s New York premiere at DGA Theater on April 8. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

If Lisa Simpson was right to consider prayer “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” then it would be appropriate to consider offensiveness the last refuge of a hack. Time and again, artists who have long since peaked and lost their originality will resort to offending their audience’s sensibilities to regain the novelty and edginess they believe they once had.

In large part, this creative exhaustion explains the whole woke movement that overtook media for the past decade. Musicians, artists, and writers took aim at the noblest things they could think of—family, community, patriotism, virtue, romantic love, religion, heroism, etc.—and attacked it through unsubtle critiques, obnoxious counternarratives, and outright ugliness. Thus, popular franchises and whole artistic genres have been deliberately ruined and rendered predictably dull. Only some of this was based in ideology, but much of it was simply the best that mediocre artists could produce.

While the woke movement is thankfully subsiding, the temptation to offend in the name of being relevant or edgy remains. And when it happens, audiences should now be trained to receive these shocks in the proper spirit, which is usually yawning and changing the channel. If one decides to take offense and express righteous outrage, this almost always gives more legitimacy and attention to the artist than he otherwise deserves.

Highly Offensive

Such is the case with a blasphemous scene from a new television series, Your Friends and Neighbors, airing on AppleTV+. In it, the main character, Andrew Cooper, and his ex-wife decide to break into a Catholic church, steal some communion wafers from the tabernacle, and spread jam on them like crackers. At one point, Cooper pretends to be a priest absolving his ex-wife by making the sign of the cross with one of the wafers.

Even in the context of the whole episode, the scene comes out of nowhere. After dropping off their adolescent kids with some strangers at Princeton, the divorced couple decides to visit a bar, reminisce about the good times as they take endless shots of Jägermeister, shoplift at a candy store, and stumble around drunkenly as they make their way to a church for no particular reason. At the end of their escapade, the two middle-aged adults make love and seem to be on a path towards reconciliation.

So why include the church scene, which was completely unnecessary? Perhaps it was intended to express forgiveness and spiritual love through the symbolism of the Host and sanctuary. Or perhaps it was to demonstrate just how awful this rich couple is, casually desecrating the Eucharist as they talk about their own petty problems. Perhaps Jon Hamm insisted on expressing his hostility to the Catholic Church, which tragically failed him when his parents divorced and his mother died from cancer.

Or, most likely, perhaps the writers of the show simply threw in this scene to add some intrigue to a show that has gone off course.

Sad Sack of Wokeness

It’s important to see Your Friends and Neighbors as part of the woke era. It has a cast of self-centered characters finding themselves, a vaguely Marxist narrative (rich people are bad), and a muddled and pointless plot line. As a show, it suffers from an identity complex, uncomfortably straddling multiple genres and abounding in unresolved themes. The only unifying element is its offensiveness. Well before its mockery of the Eucharist, it was mocking marriage, friendship, work, innocence, and a wide range of other things most people tend to value in civilized society.

It also happens to be quite boring and predictable. Even with a talented cast, seasoned writers, top-notch production values, and a promising premise (a rich hedge-fund manager turns to crime to keep up with the Joneses), it is mired in nihilism and ennui. All the characters are terrible people with no redeeming qualities, and none of them actually develop into relatable human beings. Ironically, the most sympathetic character is Andrew’s sister Allison, who comes to live with him after suffering some kind of mental breakdown. She is the enviable free spirit who transcends Andrew’s hypocritical elite society, though she vainly struggles with heartbreak and mental illness.

Once it’s understood that the series is mostly another pretentious woke product, it becomes clear that Catholic Christians should see its blasphemy as a pathetic attempt to do something interesting, rather than a bold attack on Christianity. It is an instance of unimaginative writers throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something will stick.

As such, there is little need to mount a pressure campaign and attempt to “Bud Light” AppleTV+, boycotting the company to protest its immorality and flagrant wokeness. If this is the premier content that Apple’s streaming platform is pushing, it will decline and fall on its own.

Rather, the writers and producers responsible for shows like Your Friends and Neighbors should be coaxed into rethinking their approach. Wokeness is obviously a dead end, and the petty offensiveness on display reeks of desperation. It would be better for the writers to recover the ideals they have been mocking and try to celebrate them. This would breathe new life in their story, empower them to say something that actually means something, and even give them the appeal they hope to have.

Auguste Meyrat is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.