We powered through the seven or so episodes in three nights and… barely laughed. Occasionally considered just stopping mid-episode to sleep. Season 2 is strangely discomfiting. It is too much of the gratingness of Kenny Powers. Where you delight in his idiocy, season 1 there was something pure–the joke was on him, but here, with him being in Mexico, the focus is just his relentless idiot racism and his Mexican friends, team mates and girlfriend letting him just skate. And then there is a midget. Something about it is too easy. It was like reading an issue of VICE from 2001. My only serious laughs came from Stevie, whose racism is so guileless, he’s such an idiot–and it’s all in service of his sad devotion to Kenny, there is something soft or forgivable to it–which allows for it to be funny. The relentlessness of Kenny himself, on his loser spiral, just drags. Stevie’s arc, that he finds love with a nearly mute Mexican woman, who moves her family in with them in America, just plays him as a sucker in a way that feels icky. It’s not that I expect EB&D to be PC, or even have any sort of moral component–but there was a kind of pan-cruelty to it that you have to participate in if you are going to watch. Maybe watching Kenny act out his rude delusions with pathetic white men (Season 1), and all the various dances of macho and pathos and homo-eroticism, was easier–it was certainly more nuanced–and more importantly, it was funny.