The American Vandal guys are making a mockumentary series about esports players.
It’s been nearly three years since Netflix announced that it was canceling American Vandal, Tony Yacenda, and Dan Perrault’s shockingly funny, surprisingly poignant faux docuseries about dick and poop crimes in American high schools.
Hijacking the self-serious language of a million true-crime podcasts and shows, American Vandal managed to be both extremely silly and weirdly resonant, telling stories about loneliness, isolation, and connection through the lens of saying the phrase “the dicks” like 500 times across the course of a season of TV.
The American Vandal guys are ready.
“American Vandal” creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault have landed a series order at Paramount Plus for an eSports mockumentary series called “Players,” Variety has learned.
“Players” follows a fictional pro “League of Legends” team as they pursue their first championship after years of close calls and heartache. To win it all, they will need their prodigy, a 17-year-old rookie, and their 27-year-old veteran to put their egos aside and work together.
Yacenda and Perrault created “Players” and served as executive producers, with Yacenda also attached to direct. Funny Or Die’s Joe Farrell and Mike Farah serve as executive producers alongside Tim McAuliffe, Riot Games, 3Arts’ Ari Lubet, and Brillstein Entertainment Partners’ Todd Sellers. CBS Studios will produce in association with Funny or Die.
Perrault and Yacenda are no strangers to the mockumentary format, as they proved with “American Vandal.” The first season of the Netflix series perfectly parodied the true crime genre as a pair of high school filmmakers investigate whether or not one of their classmates is really guilty of spray painting over two dozen faculty cars with images of penises.
In Season 2, the pair investigate when someone taints the lemonade in a high school cafeteria with laxatives. The show won a Peabody Award for its first season and was also nominated for an Emmy for best writing for a comedy series.
The duo has also proven themselves adept at parodying the sports world, having previously collaborated on projects like a parody of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series about the events of “Rocky IV” and “Angels in the Outfield” for CollegeHumor.
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Yacenda is repped by UTA and 3 Arts Entertainment. Perrault is repped by UTA and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.
Riot Games “League of Legends” is the most played PC game globally and generates billions of hours of gameplay per year. The game is also the basis for the world’s largest eSports, with the 2020 “League of Legends” World Championship Finals generating a record-breaking 23.04 million average minute audience.
The Bottom Line
It’s been nearly three years since Netflix announced that it was canceling American Vandal, Tony Yacenda, and Dan Perrault’s shockingly funny, surprisingly poignant faux docuseries about dick and poop crimes in American high schools.
Hijacking the self-serious language of a million true-crime podcasts and shows, American Vandal managed to be both extremely silly and weirdly resonant, telling stories about loneliness, isolation, and connection through the lens of saying the phrase “the dicks” like 500 times across the course of a season of TV.
And, we’re going, being honest: Absent any context, this idea sounds…kind of bad? Or, at least, not especially inspired? But we would have said the same thing about “high school journalist makes a documentary about someone drawing dicks on a bunch of cars.”
But, of course, it would have been catastrophically wrong there, so Yacenda and Perrault have definitely earned a pretty hefty measure of the benefit of the doubt from us when it comes to knowing how to make a premise like this come alive.
