Bo Burnham: Inside

Bo Burnham: Inside (2021) takes place in one room. Burnham spent the pandemic lockdown in the guest house at his home and built a show there. The songs are about the internet itself: making content, being watched constantly, and trying to talk to the world from a single room. How it was made is the subject. Burnham worked entirely alone, without a crew and without an audience. The footage was shot between March 2020 and May 2021, so you watch a year pass inside the show: the hair grows, the beard grows, the mood collapses. The lighting, the camera, the editing, the music and the performance all belong to one person. Parts of the film show how this is done; the projector being set up, or the camera repositioned again and again, stay inside the frame. It went out on Netflix on 30 May 2021. Burnham won three Emmys that year, for directing, writing and music direction for a variety special, the first time one person won three individually in a single year. He also received a Peabody and a Grammy for the song All Eyes On Me. It runs 88 minutes. Good for: forms sitting between stand up and the musical, work that thinks about the internet, and technically one man productions. Less good for: the show deals directly with depression, panic attacks and suicidal thought, and the comedy offers no relief on those subjects. The enclosure is deliberately suffocating and hard to sit through for some viewers.