Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nobody’s Looking’, A Brazilian Comedy About A Guardian Angel Who Upends The System

Comedies about Heaven can be amazingly funny and poignant, but they sometimes get weighed down in making fun of the rules and regulations in the afterlife rather than get down to the business of making the comedy about the characters. A new Brazilian comedy has a new guardian angel upending the system where he works. Read on for more…

NOBODY’S LOOKING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Breaking news stories from around the world about the increased number of mishaps and accidents that have been occurring.

The Gist: Cut to an industrial setting, where Ulisses (Victor Lamoglia) is getting an orientation for his new job as a guardian angel. He’s working in District 5511 of the Angelus System, and his job is to nudge the human he’s assigned to on a particular day so they avoid small and large accidents. The humans see it as “luck,” but the Angels see it as a result of their hard work. It could be something as simple as moving something that a person will trip over, or pushing a child down so he’s flat on the ground and won’t get hit by an oncoming car. He’s the first new Angel that “The Chief” has created in 300 years, which is odd considering the world’s population has exploded in that time.

He learns four rules: Follow the Daily Assignment Order (DAO), do not appear to humans, do not interfere with humans that are not in your DAO, and most importantly, NEVER go into The Chief’s office. “He’s very busy devising his master plan for humanity,” says his boss, Inspector Fred (Agusto Madiera), in the orientation film. Once Uli speed-reads the massive manual about the “brittle” humans, he goes to the main floor, where he notices everyone has red hair, white shirts, black pants and a red tie, just like him. He meets Fred, Wanda (Telma Souza), his second-in-charge (who does all the work), and the two angels (“Angeli”) that will be training him, Chun (Danilo de Moura) and Greta (Júlia Rabello). Fred takes pains to tell Uli that District 5511 has a perfect record; no one has broken any of the four rules, and he wants to keep that streak intact.

Uli’s first assignments bore the heck out of him, and he can’t understand why he has to fill out and stamp a report on the day when, as Fred tells him, all it does is get filed. No suggestions are welcomed, and no one ever looks at it again. It’s just stored in a massive file room, which Wanda has tightly organized. During his second assignment, where he has to watch a teen masturbate to phone porn, he wanders around, and sees a woman named Miriam (Kéfera Buchmann) bring a distressed homeless man into the apartment she shares with her boyfriend Richard (Projota), over his objections. “Some people follow the rules, while others change the world,” she says.

This inspires Uli to break the four rules, despite Fred telling him that if he breaks the rules, The Chief “uncreates” him, i.e. he disappears. He even goes into The Chief’s office, where he literally sees that the whole operation runs on a hamster in his wheel. When he accidentally stops the machinery and he’s still there, he realizes that he’s free to do whatever the hell he wants.

Our Take: Nobody’s Looking (original title: Ninguém Tá Olhando) could be Brazil’s answer to The Good Place, though it plays out somewhat more analogous to TBS’s Miracle Workers, showing Heaven as a massive industrial complex with a pecking order and rules and other inane aspects. And the show has the potential to be funny. But its first episode is larded down with sight gags and jokes about humanity, and it forgets to set up the characters to the point where we want to keep watching this story.

This is a hazard when you write a comedic story that’s about a world with its own rules and norms. We have to get all the information about the Angelus System along with Uli, meet the players, then watch him be the rebel and break all the rules just to see what happens. We suspect the rest of the 8-episode first season will slow that down as Uli realizes he can interact with humans with impunity, as can the rest of the Angels. He seems to have a thing for Miriam, and will also likely want to get the machinery in The Chief’s office running again.

All of that will bring out character traits that comedy from which funny stuff can be extracted. It’ll also ground a show that, for now, feels more like farce with a dollop of satire then a character-driven comedy. We saw that potential in the first episode as Uli decided to interfere with a non-DAO subject and put the homeless guy on a furniture store window display bed to keep him dry. But, of course, the guy got arrested, causing unintended circumstances, which will also be fun to explore.

Sex and Skin: Besides the masturbating teenager, which Chun seems to be interested in watching, there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: As he notices the whole operation in the Chief’s office shut down and go dark, Uli says, “Shoot…”

Sleeper Star: We couldn’t take our eyes off of Kéfera Buchmann as Miriam. Her character is unfailingly kind and selfless, and of course she has wonderful hair and a great glasses game. What’s not to like?

Most Pilot-y Line: When Uli expresses curiosity about being human, Fred says, “Humans? They’re gooey! They pay bills! They’re like the Little League of existence.” Hey, we resemble that remark! There’s also a gag about the angels taking pens and socks to drive their humans nuts that feels like a throwaway.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We suspect Nobody’s Watching will improve as its story settles into a more character-driven pace. But its first episode is weighed down with clever but not funny gags and exposition.

 

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Nobody's Looking On Netflix