Season Review: The Shivering Truth Season Two

 

Overview:

The Shivering Truth is television that does not need to be seen. It merely exists and puts its essence out into the universe with the hopes of restoring some karmic imbalance in the process. A simplistic explanation of this show could perhaps describe it as a stop-motion sketch series that embraces the existential and esoteric as it presents shocking stories about human nature at its best, worst, and middle-est. The Shivering Truth may dress itself up and act like a surreal anthology series, but that’s merely the conduit for this universal grudge match between reality and fantasy where God scalps tickets and Death livestreams the affair. There can be no shivering without any truth and that mind-bending lesson has never been more true in The Shivering Truth’s triumph of a second season.

 

Our Take:

The Shivering Truth is a show that is difficult to describe and practically prides itself in its ability to not be easily defined. Even the loglines for episodes feature philosophical questions rather than actual descriptions of what happens. The type of surreal content that The Shivering Truth trades in is an anomaly and not easy to execute, but there’s been a real increase in existential storytelling, especially in the anthology format, that’s perhaps an indication of a growing audience for the bizarre.

The advent of shows like The Shivering Truth or The Midnight Gospel are monumental programs in terms of what’s now possible on the scale of television. There used to be a time when this genre of content was extremely rare and beyond programs like Xavier: Renegade Angel, there really wasn’t anything else like it on television, let alone in an animated context. That’s not to say that these types of shows are now mainstream, but it’s encouraging to see greater risks be taken with this ambitious style of storytelling. So while The Shivering Truth isn’t the only show that barks up this tree, it remains the most beautiful and staggering in terms of what it accomplishes and the ideas that it entertains.

Vernon Chatman and Cat Solen are the geniuses responsible for The Shivering Truth and while the stories and scripts for this program are brilliant in their own right, it’s also a series that conveys tone and atmosphere incredibly well. The Shivering Truth is unquestionably funny, both in a wry, subtle way as well as in a broad and ridiculous sense, but the series creates a feeling of tension that is so unlike anything else on television.

The Shivering Truth builds anxiety, almost as if it wants the audience to have a philosophical meltdown as they consider what the episodes suggest. It’s easy to be funny, but The Shivering Truth deserves credit for how it creates the aura of anxiety. The program feels like if David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky put together a season of the Dadaist British sketch series, Jam, but with the art direction of the uncomfortably real stop-motion project, Anomalisa.

The Shivering Truth throws a lot of insanity at the audience, but it’s not without its motivations. There are strong themes that help hold each episode’s collection of tales together and through this severe silliness the series finds a poignant calm. The Shivering Truth returns to a lot of universal ideas in its episodes, but dissects them in drastically different ways. The show is at its best when it juxtaposes together anachronistic ideas, like science being used to dismantle nonsense, the commercialism of prayers and beliefs, or the inherent selfishness in simply existing.

Most episodes find a way to have these disparate threads dovetail together through their respective themes and it’s seriously impressive how some conclusions will sneak up on you in response to how they bring everything all together. This is one of the few shows where a season of only six episodes feels devastatingly too short, but the quality of each installment is so high that it’s hard to begrudge the small episode order.

There’s a lot to appreciate in just how much goes into the humor of The Shivering Truth and while plenty of the concepts alone are hysterical, there’s often painfully smart wordplay in every episode, too. The Shivering Truth is also relatively fearless with its comedy and its not afraid to threaten the cannibalization of a baby or a biological 9/11 in order to help land a gag. All of PFFR and Vernon Chatman’s works are unapologetic in that nature, but The Shivering Truth feels the most extreme and reckless with its jokes.

The Shivering Truth makes the audience think and laugh in unsettling ways, but the visual style of the show is another major achievement on the series’ part. It’s one thing to effectively use stop-motion, but Shivering Truth never cuts corners and truly pushes the limits of what can be accomplished in the medium. It’s not just the ultra-realistic character models, but the environments and crowded set pieces are visual extravaganzas that reward the audience with images that are just as unbelievable as the stories and jokes proposed. The show’s first season already looked incredible, but The Shivering Truth’s sophomore year learns how to get even more out of the medium. The climaxes of several episodes this season literally had my mouth open in awe as I took in all of the loving work that goes into every frame of this gonzo series.

The Shivering Truth had a difficult hurdle to clear after the show’s superlative first season, but the quality of the show’s second year is proof that things are only getting started here. It feels like Chatman only has a greater confidence in what he’s able to do in this series and this season experiments with structure in ways like the length of stories and just how interconnected they get with each other. Not only is the second season better than the first, but it feels like The Shivering Truth is just building momentum.

Hopefully the series will be granted another season to play around with their bonkers ideas, but there shouldn’t be any concerns that the series is running out of material or lost its magic. If anything, The Shivering Truth is creating new forms of magic to warp its audience. With any luck it will get to cast these spells for years to come.