‘American Vandal’ Season 2 Is Overestimating How Much Poop I’m Willing to Watch

American Vandal was one of Netflix’s best TV programs last year. A mockumentary about a bunch of high school kids trying to uncover the mystery of who spray-painted a bunch of dicks on the cars in the faculty parking lot turned out to be a note-perfect parody of every hot true-crime product of the past several years, from Serial to Making a Murderer to The JinxVandal got the cadence, the self-importance, the inquisitive tone, the potential breakthroughs all right. This was a smart show that was even smarter for centering its plot around a vulgar and deeply dumb central mystery. Going into season 2, would high-school investigative journalists Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck) be taking on a brand new case of high-school malfeasance?

The answer we got this morning with the trailer for season 2 was a resounding yes: a foul creature known only as the Turd Burglar, who terrorized St. Bernardine Catholic School, poisoning their lemonade and making the entire school shit their pants. On the spectrum of dick jokes > poop jokes, it all makes perfect sense for American Vandal to go in this direction. The repetition of the phrase “who drew the dicks” in various self-serious intonations was a big part of season 1’s humor, and while I’d argue that what made season 1 great wasn’t the dick jokes but rather the perfect genre parody and depiction of the high stakes of high school drama, it would be silly to suggest that season 2 didn’t need a similar dick-like hook. Enter the turd burglar and, by the looks of the trailer, a LOT of security-cam footage of Catholic students violently shitting in the hallways. And while, for many (most, even!), a poop joke is on the same level of vulgarity and grossness as a dick joke, I am here today to tell you that it is not. And while I didn’t think anything could dampen my enthusiasm for American Vandal season 2, a river of Catholic school diarrhea might do it.

Poop, I am sorry to say, is my breaking point. Poop and eyeballs, if we’re being fully honest. My two triggers in movies. I will watch any manner of horror movie — murder, mayhem, kill a pet, break a bone — and I will cringe and scream and be as repulsed as the filmmakers want to be. But fuck with somebody’s eyeball and I will full-on flee. Uma Thurman squishing Daryl Hannah’s eyeball between her toes in Kill Bill, Volume 2 almost resulted in me calling 911 on Quentin Tarantino. To save him from me beating him to death for making me watch that.

The same goes for poop. Which is fucking disgusting, you guys. To even compare it to dicks is vile. I don’t care how gnarly that dick is, I will take it any day over poop. Revulsion to dicks is a very heterosexual fear anyway. Only a straight man would think that a dick and some poop are equally repulsive, to be honest. Poop is foul. Poop is filth. Poop will give you disease. Poop is so bad that every home in America has an entire room with a door on it that locks and it’s dedicated to the swift, safe removal of poop from your home via a LITERAL RIVER THAT FLOWS OUT OF YOUR HOME to take the poop with it. Poop is the shame of humankind. “Everybody poops”? Sure. But nobody should be happy about it.

And yet, infuriatingly, poop gets used a lot in movies, relative to how often it should be used which is never. Not Fat Bastard shitting into a coffee cup and then Austin Powers drinking it. Not insane asylum inmates proving how crazy they are by writing on the walls in their own poop. Not Divine in John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, even though both Divine and John Waters were geniuses. Weirdly enough, I will accept the food-poisoning scene in Bridesmaids, and I think it’s because, even though you see characters barf, you never actually see the shit. Melissa McCarthy is planted firmly on that sink; Maya Rudolph descends almost delicately into the street. But Paul Feig wisely, tastefully kept the poop away from my precious eyeballs.

Back to American Vandal, there seems something akin to arrogance about coming back in season 2 with a heavily poop-laden storyline. It’s like they’re saying, “Yeah, we know you raved about us in season 1. We’re looking at our Peabody right now. Everybody’s so excited for us to come back, and we know it. We know that you’ll literally wade through a river of shit to have us back at it again.”

Maybe not this time, American Vandal. Maybe not this poop-averse viewer. Maybe instead I’ll subject myself to the relentless depression of Bojack Horseman instead.

(Ugh, fine, we both know I won’t do that. I’ll see you and all your poop in season 2, American Vandal. But I won’t like it.)

Stream American Vandal season 1 on Netflix