In his third comedy special with Netflix, Franco Escamilla Eavesdropping (Voyerista Auditivo), the Mexican comedian graces the stage in California. With his idiosyncratic personal experiences of gossiping (or just listening in on personal talks with headphones on), he shares his voyeuristic joys of overhearing people dish out about lives, especially at airports.
A guilty-pleasurable relatability starts off his act and pulls the audience in while chuckling over bits they might’ve enacted themselves but wouldn’t necessarily admit it. This marks Escamilla’s third outing with the OTT platform with a runtime of 122 minutes, his longest performance of the three.
Netflix describes the comedy special as:
Franco Escamilla takes the stage in California for a comedy special filled with humorous observations on gossiping, the pandemic and airport experiences.
-Franco Escamilla Eavesdropping Review Contains Spoilers-
Taking off with a sound theme that could’ve sat well with the majority and generated quite a few laughable instances, Escamilla changes the tone of his episode way too frequent. The initial bits where he lays out the Eavesdropping session at the airport are short-lived and soon, the performance spans out into a lengthy delivery that starts sounding verbose and long-drawn-out about various threads that don’t seem to tie well together.
Jokes start dragging out and you sit a while, withdrawn, waiting for the next joke to pull you back in. The first few strands of the mundane airport universal experiences may be liked even by people who haven’t travelled by a plane before because they specifically target dramatic human conversations and spell out our need to gossip (even though most of us wouldn’t admit to it).
Jumping from one thing to another, his comedy is built of patches that stop fitting with each other after a while and only seem to compensate for the long duration of the show. The only saving grace is his on and off allusion to pop culture – referring to movies like The Terminator, Finding Nemo, Harry Potter and even anime like Dragon Ball Z or Demon Slayer, and if you’re fans of either pieces of content, your attention may spike for a few moments upon hearing these titles.
Interactions with the audience at the beginning could have amounted to some interesting exchanges as well, but it again doesn’t pan out well. He shifts the attention to his momentary instrumental company of props like smoking a cigarette on stage and in the end even taking up the guitar to belt out a crudely facetious tune about porn and its extensivity.
Franco Escamilla Eavesdropping: Final Thoughts
Though grateful to have the chance to perform in Hollywood, the one delivery of Escamilla that brings about the loudest uproar is not even of his own making. He rather depends on the farcical retelling of the 2000 Summer Olympics that gave birth to the fortuitous and comical brief trailblazing rise of the Equatoguinean swimmer, Eric Moussambani.
The main theme of his comeback that was hinted at as the incongruity of the pandemic and likening it to Harry Potter’s “You-Know-Who” fear of spelling out the word gets left in the background and so does the image of eavesdropping. Moreover, the longer expanse of the episode pushes the few well-landed jokes out of our memory even before the final moment is reached.
No specifics defined the performance and it’s all rendered a forgettable mess despite his likeable disposition. The further lack of any signature one-liners once again squeezes the efforts put into the show because the viewer may be left feeling worn out while awaiting something memorable that never comes.
Franco Escamilla’s Eavesdropping is now streaming on Netflix.
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