Friends, have I got a TV show for you. True, it has a sort of lame and unnecessarily pretentious title — “On Becoming a God in Central Florida” — but I’m here to tell you it will clean your floors, shine your shoes, organize your closets, brighten your kitchen and, most importantly, enrich your life beyond your wildest dreams.
Or it won’t. Still, as darkly comedic dramas about the sorry state of the human condition go, “On Becoming a God in Central Florida” (which premiered Aug. 25 on Showtime) is a delectably weird and compellingly realized misadventure tale that makes a spot-on point about the inescapable degree of fraud that infests American-style capitalism and promises shortcuts to making millions.
Although it is set in an “Orlando adjacent” town in 1992, “On Becoming a God” is very much of a piece with all the snake oil being sold to us in 2019: the robocalls asking for your Social Security number; the relentless me-first entrepreneurism that boasts disruption as its primary virtue; the predatory lending; the cultish, $45 spin-cycle classes; and even a flimflam president who is deathly afraid of sharing his tax returns. This show, which shares both the outre mood of AMC’s superb “Lodge 49” and the criminal lure of FX’s “Fargo,” is drenched in the idea that life is one big sham. Amid so much TV escapism, I adore its steadfast and believable cynicism.
Kirsten Dunst, so memorable in “Fargo’s” second season, gives another fantastic performance here as Krystal Stubbs, a new mother whose alcoholic husband, Travis (Alexander Skarsgard), has quit his office job to devote his life to FAM, or Founders American Merchandise, an Amway-esque multilevel marketing scheme.