First Time Female Director is a movie that looked pretty good on paper. It’s the directorial debut of Chelsea Peretti, a graduate of the alt-comedy scene who starred for years on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and she also wrote and stars in it. It has a promising premise and a cast filled with talented people. The film mostly doesn’t work. While there are scattered laughs here or there, it’s never as funny as the premise and the presence of all those hilarious people, and its satire has too many targets, most of which are a couple of years out of date. It should’ve been a bad sign that the film is debuting on the Roku Channel, almost a year after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last year.
Peretti plays Sam, a playwright who’s written a Tennessee Williams-like Southern play set to be mounted at a mid-level theater in L.A. When the director’s fired on the eve of the first rehearsals for #MeToo-related reasons, Sam’s brought in to direct the play herself. The meta-joke is that Peretti is herself a first-time female director of the movie. The style of humor is 30 Rock, set in the theater—the woman in charge, played by the person who also created it, is struggling with a group of showbiz prima donnas and money people. And First Time Female Director, like 30 Rock, isn’t afraid to make the protagonist the butt of the joke.
The humor, though, just isn’t as bright and is unfocused. The cast features veterans of just about every popular sitcom of 30 Rock’s era—Peretti (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Megan Mullally (Will & Grace), Max Greenfield (New Girl), Blake Anderson (Workaholics), Amy Poehler (Parks and Recreation), Adam Scott (Parks and Rec and Party Down), and Nick Kroll (The League)— but no one from 30 Rock itself. The prominent cast members of the play include a narcissistic gay guy (Benito Skinner), straight woman (Kate Berlant), and a social media influencer (Megan Stalter), although none of them do much with these roles beyond stereotype.
There are also cameos from comedy stalwarts like Andy Richter, Tim Heidecker, Brad Hall, and Peretti’s husband, Jordan Peele, who’s gone so long since he was last on camera as an actor that I didn’t initially recognize him. Whatever the film’s faults, Peretti is good at getting her famous friends to work with her. She’s not as adept at scene transitions, presented in bizarre slo-mo.
First Time Female Director starts as a satire of contemporary theater, but the third act has added a lot of targets, including many related to race and gender. And the ending—characters yell at Peretti with cultural grievances straight out of 2017-2019—is dire. If you missed the era of “white women are just the worst” serving as a self-evident comedic premise, it’s your lucky day.
Last year’s movie Theater Camp was a much sharper and focused satire of theater people. At the same time, American Fiction better explored a late twist involving her jealousy of a Black female playwright.