Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Gtretchen Mol, Greta Lee, Gil Bellows, Colleen Camp, Donna Dixon, Jordan Peele, George Takei, Karly Warkentin, Eric Halliburton, Tara Pratt, Johannah Newmarch, Emmett Lee Stang, Emilie Taylor, Connor Sage, Charlotte Kavanagh, Shevi Ryane, Oz Perkins, Kirk Thomas, David Coakley.
We have all said it, all perhaps thought it at some point or another, and some more than others, a throwaway line in which we enslave ourselves to consumerism, in which we slowly erode the soul and fill our homes with the useless and the impractical, “If I can buy that my life will be complete, if I possess that which is on offer, I will be happy“.
Happiness is a state of mind which has become less about the pursuit of knowledge and what we can fill what we perceive as our meaningless lives with. It is how advertising works, how capitalism worms its way into your life, it offers the bright and the new, it creates demand, it makes others look down upon you when they find out you are not interested in you and then it just becomes another thing you didn’t know you needed until like sipping an antidote after unknowingly drinking poison, it has you hooked.
In a call back to a classic villain from Rod Serling’s tenure as the narrator of The Twilight Zone, the Kanamits return to Earth to decimate humanity by what they want most, to be led into happiness, and in a nod to online shopping’s most insidious phrase, You Might Also Like, the second series under the watchful eye of Jordan Peele finished off with the type of bang that eerily and frighteningly could be seen to happen, that humanity is not destroyed by nuclear annihilation or by global warming, but by our own greed and jealousy, by want.
Written by Oz Perkins, and who alongside the legendary George Takei plays one of the Kanamits who is studying Gretchen Mol’s Janet Warren, the episode is the clearest warning of our own destruction, that we have become dependent on the idea that our happiness is based squarely on what we own, and not on what we can achieve, offer to others, or see with our own eyes, namely the sincerity of a world at peace.
Life has become about want, our lives dictated by the feeling of a sadness that is not real and which can only be elevated by the acquisition of the latest gadget or the newest fad. You Might Also Like is the reminder that happiness does not get delivered from a shop or from the likes of Amazon, it is the gift of the human mind and soul.
Ian D. Hall