The Hunt for the Trump Tapes - Season 1

It's clear this isn't a prelude to some eye-popping exposé but it's weirdly fun watching the two actors settle into their vastly disparate places in the Hollywood hierarchy anyway.

It's too much. It's redundant. It magnifies our collective obsession and hatred of Trump, but it doesn't say anything new whatsoever.

The most 2018 thing about Viceland's new series The Hunt for the Trump Tapes With Tom Arnold is how impossible it is to tell which portions of it are self-promotion and which parts of it are sincere.

It turns out the painting looks more like Arnold than his intended subject.

The problem is, we don't need tapes to confirm the obvious...

I can nod enthusiastically with Arnold's nonstop indignation, but if his new show was meant to educate me or amuse me, it failed.

Tom Arnold is correct: An old-school dumbass like him shouldn't be president. But an old-school dumbass like him also shouldn't be the one investigating the president, either, unless he's going to do it in a real way.

You can harness that anxiety and passion for political action, or you can milk it for another turn in front of the camera. On that enterprise, the tape never stops rolling.

Arnold's haphazard methods can come across as somewhat pathetic. But he more than makes up for it with a wild expression of patriotic determination.

The show is fueled, parasitically, by the times in which we live, even as it has little to say about them beyond that they are unbelievable and crazy.