Survival Street
“Salutation Street” used to be a popular show on public television where kids learned life lessons from puppets and their human friends. At least it was until a Supreme Court ruling expanded the rights of corporations into actual personhood, giving them the chance to vote themselves into office, and privatize EVERYTHING about America. Now the humans and puppets (Felt-Americans, if you will) of that show find themselves living a much different life. They’re fighting back against the dystopian corporate hellscape that this country has become. Not with words or platitudes, but with guns, explosives, and DIY technical know-how. When Corporal Fairness says “Play fair or I’ll be there,” the promise now includes a bullet to the head for anyone not abiding by those words.
Having the cast of a thinly-veiled riff on “Sesame Street” act as freedom fighters in a satire about our modern era sounded like a great idea and I’ve had my eye on this series ever since it was first solicited. The promise of that idea is mostly delivered on as co-writers James Asmus and Jim Festante capture a lot of the absurdity it implies. This is also helped immensely by artist Abylay Kussainov’s art which creates a silly but believable world for all of this ridiculousness to take place in. It all leads to a frequently funny miniseries that delivers on the laughs, up to the point where things stop feeling like satire.
Asmus and Festante correctly note in their afterword that satire needs to be escapist and funny to get people onboard, but not close enough to the issues that people reject it due to their own ideologies or burnout. “Survival Street” expertly illustrates that point as things go on and the story starts hewing closer to familiar tropes with more overt pleas for sanity and friendship. This is best seen in the Sundae Fiend’s rejection of her defining trait all to Make A Point rather than to Serve The Story. It’s this kind of mentality that ultimately left me wanting to like “Survival Street” more than I actually did.