Junk Food for Thought is the review column about whatever it’s about.
The Onion’s 2012 miniseries “Porkin’ Across America” takes a premise which might make a decent five-minute comedy sketch and stretches it into a 55-minute horror nightmare.
Nominally a satire of road-trip food shows like “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” the series follows morning show host Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) as he sets out to eat one pork dish in each of the 50 states in the Union.
At the start, the series’s angle seems clear. Behind all his presentational enthusiasm, Jim is a hilariously inept host for a food show. At one point he confidently declares, “Meat sure changes a lot during the cooking process!” And on top of that, thanks to his quixotic dedication to his pork pilgrimage, his personal life is falling apart.
In the first episode, Jim’s shallow food review is repeatedly interrupted by phone calls from his wife and neighbors informing him that thanks to his habit of flushing garbage down the toilet, his condo is now flooding. This sets in motion a chain of events that systematically strips Jim of everything he loves: his home, his family and his chance to truly enjoy all that pork.
Therein lies the series’s basic formula: Jim tries desperately to save his life from collapse as he is dispassionately informed by phone call after phone call that, among other things, his dog is being euthanized, his car is parked in a garage scheduled for demolition and his wife is leaving him. Paralyzed by his inexplicable commitment to his absurd pork-based quest, Jim’s only solutions for his accumulating problems are throwing wads of money at them and drowning his sorrows in pig’s blood.
That’s right. Jim becomes addicted to drinking pig’s blood.
After unknowingly drinking several cups of it while distracted from a review by the news of his divorce, Jim starts requesting near-constant doses of the stuff, eventually losing his taste for all other beverages. It’s extremely unsettling, but that’s not even the strangest part.
A cooking mishap in the third episode leads Jim to puncture his hard palate on a bone-filled carnitas burrito. When he’s taken to the hospital, he learns that because of his divorce he is no longer included under his ex-wife’s insurance plan. With no insurance, the doctors are forced to replace Jim’s palate with the cheapest alternative—a pig palate.
As the episodes progress and Jim’s pork odyssey is further strained by his dissolving personal life, so too does his physical condition become more grotesque. Eating nothing but pork and drinking nothing but pig’s blood, an increasingly anxious and accident-prone Jim finds his entire existence rapidly deteriorating.
The series’s “family always comes first” message is clear from its first five minutes, but the lengths of psychological and physical horror to which it goes to hammer that message in are what make the series so impactful.
Don’t get me wrong, the show definitely has a sense of humor (“The American Dream is having it all—with a side of pork”), but it’s incredibly dry and morbid. The tonal whiplash of Jim hearing his dog die over the phone and then turning to camera to mindlessly enthuse about pork is less funny than it is disturbing.
Holbrook’s standout performance and the low-budget documentary look of the series go a long way toward grounding its surrealism in a believable world and selling moments that would otherwise come off as overly cheesy. With the exception of a couple of shoddy effects in the penultimate episode, the series manages to stay surprisingly verisimilar throughout. If you’re willing to stomach its body horror and bone-dry comedy, you can watch “Porkin’ Across America” in its entirety for free on YouTube. It’s an underrated gem, a compelling character study and will surely have you never wanting to eat pork again.
★★★★★★★★☆☆
Photo courtesy of Onion Digital Studios
