Once upon a time, in the 1990s, the day-time talk show was one of the central pillars of American pop culture. It came in two common varieties. The first was your standard celebrity-focused format, where the stars shared intimate details of their lives and work with their news-starved fans (now they just do that on social media). The other invited regular John and Jane Does to come on national television and discuss their darkest, most disturbing personal issues with the nation at large.

Hosts like Maury Povich, Montel Williams and Jerry Springer would run wild, conducting paternity tests or discussing a hapless guest’s sexual orientation while a live audience gasped and applauded on cue. Scandalous, outrageous and full of controversy, these shows—particularly The Jerry Springer Show—prefigured reality TV’s takeover of our TV screens (and brains) in the 2000s.

On his latest Netflix offering This Is Your Country, American comedian Tim Dillon pays homage to—or parodies, depending on your perspective—this latter brand of reality-adjacent talk show. In front of a live audience, he brings a series of guests onto the stage in order to discuss pressing personal issues. Like a spouse making a living off of OnlyFans. Or a partner who sank the family savings in NFTs. Or a person who thinks they are a dog trapped inside a human body.

In the hands of an able comedian, these topics are easy lay-ups, jumping points for cutting commentary on the issues that plague modern America. We’ve seen Dillon do just that on his YouTube podcast The Tim Dillon Show, where he discusses American politics and pop culture. That show catapulted Dillon to fame during the pandemic, resulting in his first Netflix special A Real Hero.

But little of that insight and empathy is on offer on This Is Your Country. On the contrary, the entire show comes across as a rerun of an episode of The Jerry Springer Show, where a live audience and the host make light of people’s very real—if somewhat unorthodox—problems. Sure, they might be odd, but using their struggles as entertainment fodder leaves a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.

When a man confesses to being a former porn star in front of his mother and partner and refers to Kim Kardashian, Dillon takes the opportunity to call her America’s “most successful whore”. In another instance, he asks a mom—who wants her Gen Z daughter to stop giving into all the food fads—whether she has been “face-fucked by sourdough bread”. It all leans too heavily on shock factor, with little actual humour.

One does wonder if these are real people or plants—he insists they’re real—but that’s besides the point. My main gripe with the show is that the laughter is aimed squarely at the people laying their hearts out on stage. A tactful comedian would use these confessions as an opportunity to take aim at some of America’s Big Issues à la The Opposition with Jordan Klepper or Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? Dillon, on the other hand, never manages to get beyond mean-spirited mockery.

It’s not a total loss. There are some glimpses of Dillon’s comedic prowess sprinkled throughout the 47-minute special, throwaway lines that draw real chuckles. But these moments are too few and far apart. This Is Your Country feels a bit like a rough pilot episode, that Dillon presumably hopes will evolve into a full-time series. It’s a promising premise let down by unimaginative, lacklustre execution.