Joe Pera Talks With You

TV Show. 2018-2020. Joe Pera

Joe Pera, the starring character of Joe Pera talks with you, spends a lot of his time addressing the camera as he goes through his quiet, relatively low impact life in a small Michigan town.

There is a lot of nonsense, and a lot of sweetness, and a lot of sweet nonsense in this show. Formally Joe Pera Talks with You is a parody of small town smallness - Pera’s character is simple, unambitious, easily distracted, apparently not very smart. However, the parody in the show is very, very shallow: it exists mostly as an excuse to let the viewer have some of that same small town smallness. It just isn’t possible to make a show about how wonderful it is to go out for breakfast on a weekend without winking, so the show does the required minimum of winking and then lets you enjoy the wonder.

At the beginning of the Coronavirus lockdown, Pera released Relaxing Old Footage With Joe Pera for free on YouTube. It’s still up, and still beautiful.