The South African S*** Show is back at it again and better than ever!

As season 30 of the South African S*** Show (Sass) draws to a close, I simply do not understand how none of the major streaming services have picked up on this ground-breaking and emotional-state-capturing show.

What even is a genre? 

While writers and directors on inferior shows continue to stick with the dated formula of genre filmmaking, I’ve heard from a very reliable source that every morning, the Sass head writer walks into the writers’ room, takes one last swig and tells his team of scribes, “hold my beer pot,” then lets out a burp, filling the writer’s room with the nourishing aroma of recently brewed umqombothi. The potent fumes inspire all in the room; minds are expanded; genre boundaries are incinerated, and Emmy Award-worthy creativity abounds.

Take, for example, the show’s recent excursion into the fantasy-sci-fi-horror-drama genre. The writer’s room draws on themes initially explored in the 2004 cult classic, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play a couple that gets their memories of each other erased in order to move on from the memory of their turbulent relationship, only for fate to conspire another meeting between the two, as strangers once again, seemingly keen on giving toxicity another go.

Sass takes this relationship dynamic to a new, bigger, better and wholly original level, as a toxic romance between the fictional populace and a former president is rekindled and doused with extra paraffin. The president, a previously disgraced character, an ex-con and as underappreciated inventor of anti-retroviral crystal showerheads, is none other than Jake Z, once thought relegated to the past and likely to spend his golden years relaxing firepoolside, if not meditating in the soothing solitude of prison. Not so as the brilliant writers’ room would have it, Jake returns with more wives and children than his biblical namesake.

I’ve been lucky enough to get a preview of upcoming season 31 episodes and spoiler alert: as viewers of the show will soon find out in the season’s big reveal, there’s a perfectly logical reason for Jake’s new wave of popularity. It seems a dangerous experimental virus escaped from a KZN lab, leading to a countrywide memory loss pandemic, with symptoms of Stockholm’s syndrome. It later turns out that the lab’s scientists leaked the virus, and they were working with Jake all along.

The show is obviously (and very cleverly) using the fictional character of Jake Z — played a very talented and well-cast actor I must say — to comment on events of the real world, such as the brain-melting mystery of the return of Trump in the West or the return to power of the once exiled dictatorial Marcos family in the Philippines.

And as with Trump in the real world, no amount of effort to remind the fictional populace of Jake’s past, the corruption, the stolen money, the institutions destroyed, the court cases, the poverty, none of this seems to work against this new virus.

The show’s archivists, investigators, prosecutors, and journalists, all in one way or another having held the responsibility of guarding, defending, and regularly disseminating a truth serum once believed to be highly effective against similar outbreaks of the whattheactualfuck family of viruses, find themselves at an impasse. No amount of truth serum seems to work against the memory loss and Stockholm’s syndrome induced by this new areyoufuckingkiddingme strain of the virus.

As Jake continues on his anti-hero’s journey, inching ever closer to the seat of power and further away from accountability, some had hoped that as an ex-con, the country’s constitution and laws might prove to be an obstacle on his path. Not so, as revealed in this week’s episode, the fictional electoral courts have cleared the way for the man to pursue the country’s top seat.

Read more in Daily Maverick: The unstoppable impunities of being Jacob Zuma — with a lot of help from the ANC

Has the virus spread to the courts as well? Personally, I would advise against this sort of speculation. I’m normally pretty good at predicting story twists and turns, where writers might be taking a story. Admittedly, I’ve only seen a few of the next season’s episodes, but even I am dumbfounded. I am simply blown away by this show. How do they do it? How do they straddle the fantasy sci-fi genres and realism so convincingly?

It’s almost prescient how well it is written. In the South African S*** Show, you’ll find themes and plots reflecting just about every major socio-political trend that currently exists in the real world, but blown up, clowned up and exaggerated for dramatic effect.

“Unemployment? Hold my beer pot…. Poverty? You know nothing Jon Snow…. Crime and corruption? The writer’s room has you covered.”

All this in a show built around a country populated by some of the loveliest, friendliest, and most helpful and neighbourly characters. True ‘salt of the earth’ types.

I don’t know how the writers do it, but with their penchant for hyperbole, paradox, horror, and gratuitous violence, I hope they never decide to write a war-inspired story. Resilient they may be, but I can’t imagine the people of the South can take much more, even for fictional characters.

Thankfully, in the real world, real humans don’t have to be as resilient as people of the fictional nation Jake Z once led to the precipice of Armageddon. DM