‘In the Know’ Review: This American Narcissist

Mike Judge was a creator of the happily mordant HBO comedy “Silicon Valley” and Zach Woods was a key member of its ensemble cast. They must have enjoyed the time they spent working together, because they have teamed up again for “In the Know” (premiering Thursday on Peacock), another biting workplace satire set in a subculture ripe for mockery.

Their new target (Judge and Woods created the show with Brandon Gardner) is National Public Radio, and their new medium is stop-motion animation. NPR is smaller prey than the world of tech start-ups, and while “In the Know” differs from “Silicon Valley” in subject matter and style, the central difference is in scale. “Silicon Valley” was more of a maximalist show, a big-boned farce that was both satirical and, in a sneaky way, aspirational. “In the Know” is the definition of a miniature; it is precious, in every good and not-so-good sense of the word.

Nearly all of the show’s six-episode season takes place inside the nondescript New York studio of an NPR interview show called “In the Know.” (The cluttered, airless spaces have been beautifully rendered, down to the last stacked cardboard box, by the animation studio ShadowMachine; they will bring a shudder to anyone who has worked long hours for mediocre pay in the legacy media business.) It’s the fief of Lauren Caspian (Woods), pasty and shock-haired, who is identified as the network’s third-most-popular host.

“Silicon Valley” generated its humor from the efforts of a handful of more-or-less decent characters to corral the energies of the oddballs and fakers around them; the narrower world of “In the Know” is dominated by the comic awfulness of Lauren. He’s a particularly modern variety of monster: a smug, vain provocateur and throbbing ball of insecurity who has adopted performative wokeness as a personal brand and a cudgel — Frasier Crane without the style or grace. His interviews inevitably become audio selfies: “And because I feel like we’re in a flow where you’re agreeing with me, would you mind if I rant about the violence of the male gaze?”

That request is addressed to the model and actress Kaia Gerber, who, like all the interviewees — including Ken Burns, Mike Tyson and Tegan and Sara — appears as herself, her nonanimated face looming in a video-chat screen. It’s an odd and distancing device, which is probably the point — it emphasizes the insularity and artificiality of the characters’ lives inside the studio, cut off from the rhythms of the real world, an effect to which the herky-jerky pace and jewel-box surfaces of the stop-motion animation also contribute.

Within that sphere we’re treated to a voice performance by Woods that is a small, hilarious, somewhat dismaying tour de force. Reaching back to his Gabe Lewis character in “The Office,” he puts the anger, condescension and self-regard right on the surface, and he swerves effortlessly between pompous confidence and sweaty panic. Lauren doesn’t bother to keep a lid on his simmering contempt, he just recodes it as a stream of virtue-signaling cant. (He tells a guest, the “Queer Eye” star Jonathan Van Ness, that he is “workshopping” a new slur, strogre, that combines straight and ogre; Van Ness, who plays himself quite winningly, winces and tells him that he might be forcing it.)