'Supervillain: The Making of Tekashi 6ix9ine' Can't Meet Its Own Ambition: TV Review
Caroline Framke, provided by
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In trying to explain the man and phenomenon that is Tekashi 6ix9ine, Showtime’s new docuseries does its best to embody him.
“Supervillain: The Making of Tekashi 6ix9ine,” directed by Karam Gill, alternates between self-consciously shaggy found footage and slick, stylized interludes. Like its subject, “Supervillain” depends on social media to build itself up. It stitches together years of Instagram videos to paint its portrait of a man who deliberately transformed himself into rap’s most chaotic antagonist, with his rise reflected in his ballooning follower numbers. It interviews people from his inner circle, observers of his increasingly hyperbolic life and, sporadically, Tekashi 6x9ine himself in audio clips from the suburban safehouse he’s most recently called home. Throughout its three episodes — titled “Identity,” “Power” and “Truth” — the series interrupts itself for flashy stop motion explainers in which narrator Giancarlo Esposito breaks down the crucial elements that make a true supervillain, including appearance, notoriety, ego, and trauma. It has the veneer of completism, but by the end of its final episode, “Supervillain” feels more like an exercise in curiosity that became too impressed with its own conclusions to convincingly support them.