So yesterday, Deadline (the ugliest website in the world, BTW) announced that Will Ferrell would be making a Netflix film about Eurovision.
And Eurofans panicked.
But as a Will Ferrell fan, I’m here to tell you to relax. And why?
1. Will Ferrell’s been watching the contest since 1999, due to the influence of his Swedish wife. He speaks Swedish, and was even a member of the official delegation from Sweden at this year’s Eurovision. You think that Christer Bjorkman’s going to let someone Swedish ruin the contest for everyone? (And no, this is not the place for a Benjamin Ingrosso joke.) Here’s one of Ferrell’s Swedish Old Milwaukee commercials.
Don’t tell me that doesn’t look like a Eurovision postcard from the 1970s!
2. Will Ferrell has more money than he knows what to do with and can spend his time doing weird comedic experiments, rather than anything that’s going to rely on a “Europe! Spangles! Isn’t it funny?” joke. Take, for example, his recreation of the Lifetime film A Deadly Adoption. Or the time he performed a film entirely in Spanish, Casa De Mi Padre, starring alongside Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. Or the time he did colour commentary for Harry and Meghan’s wedding on HBO. Or the time he photobombed the New York Times Vows section, Or his series of advertisements for Old Milwaukee, including this one, which aired during the Super Bowl:
3. Will Ferrell is a good guy who creates comedy out of deeply uncomedic things. Do you remember the film The Other Guys? It was essentially a buddy cop spoof, but the end credits of the film were an explanation of the 2008 financial crisis.
4. Will Ferrell is incredibly funny. The ‘glass case of emotion’ scene from Anchorman still makes me crack up every time I see it:
5. Finally, Eurovision is beyond parody, because it’s hard to make fun of a contest where the truth is too far-fetched for scripts. That’s what Love Love Peace Peace was so successful – it was a litany of references to other strange things that had happened during previous contests:
And with a track record of watching Eurovision, Ferrell’s going to know that nothing beats a hologram of a naked man howling with a wolf. Or a drag queen smashing watermelons. Or a man rising from a piano coffin. Or that cape. Or the Salvation Army band entering the contest. Or women in beards. And a bearded woman. Or Verka Seduchka, who is so good on her own that she was even used in a Paul Feig comedy film with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham.
And nothing that Ferrell comes up with can make any of that less surreal, less funny, and less entertaining to watch. No Netflix film is going to lessen that.
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