Santa Inc. has, frankly, a fantastic premise. Santa is the head of a huge corporation that delivers gifts every Christmas, putting them in direct competition with Amazon and the like. Santa is actually a title held by a long line of men over the centuries and, as the current Santa is about to step down, an elf becomes determined to become the first female Santa.
If Santa Inc. had simply stuck with that premise, it would have been fine. Maybe not groundbreaking or amazing, but fine. A Christmas themed take on gender politics would be fantastic even if it wasn’t written that well.
The trouble is, Santa Inc. isn’t just written badly it’s written horrifically, determined to be as crass and disgusting as it can be. Personally, I don’t mind crass and disgusting as long it’s done well… but, as I said, the writing in this miniseries is horrific. Cynical and mean-spirited, with an edgelord nature plucked right out of a 10th grade boys locker room.
It’s not that the show is gross and mean, it’s that the show is desperate to be as gross and mean as possible without bothering to exploit its premise or even be that funny.
Imagine how you can listen to teenage boys crack jokes at each other and never laugh because everything they say is so phenomenally stupid. That is this show.
There is not a single character in this show that I liked. Not a single one. All of them are horrible.
Gross, desperate, and phenomenally stupid.
Jason Gaston 