There Isn’t Much Sunshine in ‘It’s Florida, Man’
If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time since about 2013, you’ve run into the “Florida Man” meme, premised on the idea that, at any given moment, a Florida man is wilding out in a way that’s possibly criminal and definitely irrational. If a man is almost dying getting a lap dance from his housekeeper, snorting coke to hide evidence after fleeing a traffic stop or jogging shirtless in defiance of Hurricane Milton’s imminent landfall, he’s a Florida man. He’s been immortalized in a website, an Instagram feed, a subreddit and quasi-Olympic “Games” where competitors wrestle in muddy water and tussle while holding pitchers of beer. He used to be the subject of a Twitter feed collecting kooky stories, but its curator, Freddie Campion, retired it in 2019. As he told Logan Hill for a piece in the Washington Post that year, Campion shut it down after wondering, “How much do I want to be a party to essentially making fun of people on the worst day of their lives, even if they have done something wrong?”
This Friday, five and a half years after the author of the original Florida Man Twitter felt it had crossed a boundary of good taste and shouldn’t continue, HBO is mining Florida Man stories for a semi-scripted comedy from Rough House Pictures. The production company, founded by Danny McBride, David Gordon Green and Jody Hill, has previously brought the network such shows as Eastbound & Down and The Righteous Gemstones. While It’s Florida, Man might not be these producers’ most mean-spirited project, it’s probably the most patronizing.
Just like the social media feeds and web aggregators are (or were), It’s Florida, Man is built on true stories. In each episode, an ordinary person tells the story of either finding or placing themselves in an extraordinary situation. The show cuts from the original subjects to comic actors re-enacting the scenarios. In the four episodes provided to critics, those include Matty Cardarople (Reservation Dogs), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (The Grinder), Anna Faris (Mom), Jon Gries (The White Lotus), Echo Kellum (Grand Crew), Ego Nwodim (Saturday Night Live), Randall Park (Fresh Off the Boat), Simon Rex (Red Rocket) and Sam Richardson (Detroiters).
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At some moments, the re-enactments are necessary to contextualize descriptions that are — for an even-keeled viewer who’s led a less colorful life than the speakers — hard to picture. At others, the performers offer a physical counterpoint to the positive spin the tellers are trying to put on their own stories.
This rundown may remind you of Comedy Central’s late Drunk History, and not just because roughly half the performers in the list above and McBride appeared on it during its six-season run. For the uninitiated: Drunk History’s creator Derek Waters invited amateur historians to research a true vignette from history, got them absolutely wasted, then had them recite the story while comedy stars acted them out, including lip-syncing dialogue the drunkards improvised. Florida doesn’t put too much effort into updating the format — after all, it’s not like Drunk History invented the concept of the spoofy comedy cutaway — and some of the real people recalling their own personal histories seem like they may have “loosened up” a little before they got on camera. But if Drunk History could be frustrating depending on how funny and/or drunk the narrators were, you can imagine how much more the quality varies on Florida, given that the people involved (apparently) don’t have any training or experience as comedy performers. As peculiar as they generally are, and as much as their stories benefit from judicious editing, their entertainment value has a ceiling.
But assessing the show on a comedy level is almost beside the point when so many of the real people involved seem troubled. Even if we see that the key players have survived to recount their own strange tales — and not from a visiting room at a correctional facility, even though two of the episodes I watched involve contact with law enforcement, and a third probably should have — we’re still hearing about targeted harassment, robbery, dismemberment, attempted arson and cannibalism.
Of course there’s an episode about a Florida man getting his arm ripped off by a gator after sneaking under a fence into a swamp. You might expect “Gator” to be the series premiere, and the only reason it’s not is because that one, “Toes,” is about a Craigslist connection between wealthy fetishist Steve and Phil, the Florida man Steve hired to cut off three of Steve’s toes and eat them. (Phil never would have considered it — he’s a vegetarian! — except that he needed money to go to an EDM show in Colorado.)
Whitney’s episode, “Mermaids,” starts with a splashy re-enactment of her next-door neighbors performing naked rituals in their yard. When we later learn that one of those neighbors, Jeff, is a sheriff’s deputy who improperly used his access to open a sealed record and learn about a pot conviction that Whitney’d had expunged, the violation of her rights gets much less screen time than either his wife Mia’s description of her beliefs as a practicing witch, or the deep dive on the catty text chain that had caused problems for Whitney with Mia when the two women worked together. Whitney’s one of the narrators who presents as a functional member of society; others feature people whose stories revolve around their homelessness, confusion and despair. If the stories that get retold were selected because they’re light and fun — sure, some people get arrested or maimed, but no one dies — the appeal lasts until you let yourself wonder what the subjects might have done as soon as the production crew left.
Though all the show’s real people are, presumably, willing participants with their own reasons for broadcasting their stories again here, being a good sport about one of the worst things that ever happened to you wouldn’t be necessary if the world had never found out about it at all. (It’s largely because of Florida’s Sunshine Act that these reports surface to go viral in the first place.) I hope Green, Hill and McBride compensated their contributors generously. I hope the storytellers churning up their trauma for HBO’s cameras got whatever kinds of help they need. And I hope the fourth season of The Righteous Gemstones keeps the Rough House crew too busy to make it back to Florida any time soon.
