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Promotional art for Inside
Cover image credit: via TMDB

Inside

Bo Burnham

Netflix · 2021 · 87 min

A claustrophobic, synth-heavy musical comedy special made in isolation.

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Instead of a stage and a crowded theater, the special takes place in a single wood-paneled room. Bo Burnham spent the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic alone in a Los Angeles guest house, writing, filming, editing, and performing a collection of musical numbers that double as a diary of isolation. The result is a claustrophobic portrait of a performer trying to entertain an audience that isn’t there, using nothing but synthesizers, a camera rig, and an increasingly cluttered space.

The project came five years after Burnham walked away from live stand-up following a series of onstage panic attacks. During his hiatus, he directed the film Eighth Grade and took supporting acting roles, but the pandemic pulled him back to solo creation. He set up his gear in a detached guest house in Los Angeles—a space that happened to sit on the property used as Nancy’s house in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street. Over 87 minutes, Burnham moves from synth-pop tracks like ‘Bezos I’ and ‘Sexting’ to cynical observations on digital life in ‘Welcome to the Internet’ and ‘White Woman’s Instagram’. Behind-the-scenes clips show him adjusting spotlights, testing audio, and watching his own footage, emphasizing the solitary grind of the production.

The project was highly praised for capturing the weird, anxious mood of 2020. It went on to win three Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Writing and Directing for a Variety Special, and a Peabody Award. The soundtrack album was certified platinum, and ‘All Eyes On Me’ won a Grammy, cementing the experiment as a major success despite the Recording Academy controversially ruling the full album ineligible for the Best Comedy Album category.

The set list

7 bits

  1. White Woman's Instagram

    A meticulous visual parody mocking the aesthetic tropes and curated privilege of Instagram grids, interrupted by a poignant moment about a woman grieving her deceased mother.

  2. How the World Works

    Burnham begins an upbeat children's song about nature that is hijacked by a sock puppet named Socko, who delivers a scathing lecture on worker exploitation and historical genocide.

  3. Unpaid Intern reaction video loop

    After performing a brief song on exploitative labor, Burnham films a self-absorbed reaction video to his own performance, subsequently falling into an infinite recursive loop of reacting to his own reactions.

  4. Welcome to the Internet

    Burnham adopts the persona of a sinister carnival barker and M.C. guiding the viewer through the intoxicating, chaotic, and destructive excess of endless internet content.

  5. Video game streamer parody

    Spoofs a detached YouTuber live-streaming gameplay of a game where the avatar is Burnham himself, trapped in a room with controls limited to pacing and crying.

  6. All Eyes On Me

    Performing against pre-recorded audience audio, Burnham candidly reveals his history of panic attacks and how his planned 2020 comeback was thwarted by the pandemic, demanding the invisible audience pray for him.

  7. The closer (spoiler). Show it

    Goodbye closer

    A climactic recap song incorporating motifs and lyrics from earlier tracks, showing Burnham vowing never to go outside again before he exits the room and is locked out by an unseen laughing audience.

How it plays

Tone
Bleak, claustrophobic, satirical, introspective, vulnerable, and darkly comedic.
On stage
Anxious, intensely self-aware, and manic; oscillates between satirical internet archetypes, theatrical characters, and raw, unraveling confessional distress.
Pace
Shifts dynamically from fast-paced, high-energy pop parodies and kinetic musical numbers to slow, suffocating, and depressed stillness during behind-the-scenes interstitials.
About
COVID-19 pandemic isolation and quarantine, Mental health deterioration, anxiety, and depression, Internet culture and digital consumption, Social media performativity and vanity, Late-stage capitalism and corporate posturing, Aging and turning 30

What the critics said

A claustrophobic masterclass in comedy and introspection, Inside is a beautifully bleak, hilariously hopeful special from Bo Burnham.

In the room: Recorded without a live in-person audience; Burnham manufactures room dynamic through pre-recorded canned laughter and audience backing tracks.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, rottentomatoes.com, petapixel.com, vulture.com, nytimes.com, chortle.co.uk, newyorker.com, web.archive.org, rogerebert.com.

Backstory

Filmed in complete isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine without a crew or audience, coinciding with Burnham turning 30 years old and confronting deteriorating mental health.

Details

Released
Taped
Guest house of Bo Burnham's home, Los Angeles
Runtime
87 min
Where
Netflix
Director
Bo Burnham
Honors
Peabody AwardEmmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Variety SpecialEmmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction and 2 more
Topics
Before
Make Happy (2016)
After
The Inside Outtakes (2022)

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