Literally Who Cares?!

Leo Reich spends his debut hour playing a monstrous caricature of a Gen-Z influencer, a camp egomaniac who uses social media buzzwords to cover up a gaping existential void. He struts across the stage in raver gear, asking the crowd “Am I hot?” and “Is this helping?” while delivering a mix of musical comedy, spoken-word memoir, and pure nonsense. Behind the theatrical self-absorption is a very funny, highly stylized look at the exhaustion of modern identity performance.

Filmed at the EartH theatre in Hackney, London, the special is the culmination of a show that took the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe by storm before transferring Off-Broadway. Reich, who previously toured as an opening act for Simon Amstell, leans heavily into electropop music to anchor his stage persona, belting out showy anthems about hookups and writing a song specifically dedicated to mocking “the old” for ruining the environment. He breaks up the music with theatrical storytelling, including a dramatic reading of his own premature memoir over a jazz backing track and a mournful lament about his last forward roll at age nine. The stage show earned Reich a Best Newcomer nomination at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2022 before A24 and HBO teamed up to produce this filmed version in late 2023.