The danger here is two-fold, as eight 30-minute episodes requires a lot more material than a 90-minute movie, and exploring the origins of these characters and gags might diminish their winning nonsense. The latter proves no trouble, as oftentimes the backstories for Camp Firewood’s staff and cartoon world only get more inexplicable the more anyone tries to explain them. The fifth and sixth episodes alone feature a heated courtroom battle, Jon Hamm as an assassin disguised as Weird Al Yankovic, and a musical that crescendos in an electric chair execution, all of which is consistent and of a piece with Wet Hot American Summer as a whole.
A willingness to indulge sheer absurdity is Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp‘s asset, so long as that’s of value to your sensibilities. A lot of the time, the jokes have no more depth to them than the verbal or physical spin the comedians will put on the line as it’s played. This is comedy built for volume, not accuracy: every episode features at least one or two laugh-out-loud moments, but also a lot of beats that might only strike you as funny come the second or third rewatch.
The most noticeable issue First Day of Camp has to contend with is scheduling. On top of the returning cast, the miniseries adds the likes of John Slattery, Jason Schwartzman, Kristen Wiig, Michaela Watkins, and enough other ringers to fill up the rest of this review. A bigger and better cadre of funny performers could not be asked for, but wrangling them all presents a challenge that First Day of Camp doesn’t find a great solution to. The miniseries mostly breaks the characters off into groups of two and three, no doubt in order to try and accommodate the availability of the actors, but compromise is often evident. It’s awkward to watch the actors address offstage partners who were clearly not available at the time of shooting, with one major plotline using Poehler as a baton to link separate shots containing Slattery and Cooper into a scene ostensibly containing all three.
It’s a work-around somewhat in keeping with the slapdash nature of the original (drink every time the weather changes and you’ll be dead inside an hour). First Day of Camp’s greatest accomplishment isn’t that it gets the band back together, but that it makes their reunion both a tribute to and continuation of the original film. The soundtrack is full of squealing guitars, the more prominently featured child actors are surprisingly funny, and the kid playing Arty “The Beekeeper” Solomon still has his dialogue overdubbed by Samm Levine for some reason. The long-term payoff for the original’s “anything goes” attitude is that no joke or character is so sacred as to feel ruined by revisiting, reimagining, or expanding on them.
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp is a block party of a miniseries, an excuse for spirited chaos that gets more into a groove the longer it goes on. But it’s also just as unbeholden to the uninitiated as all Wain-Showalter joints are. Given the reach of Netflix and the attractiveness of the ensemble, the viewership that will respond to the miniseries with a befuddled shrug will probably outnumber those genuinely thrilled by its existence. Even fans of the original won’t be able to ignore how Wet Hot American Summer isn’t quite the same in 2015 as it was in 2001, but they’ll still have a blast jumping back into Wain and Showalter’s unlikely comedy spawning pool.
