John Cho Is Everywhere (Complimentary)

Well well well, look who is in all my shows…

Welcome to The Five Spot, a Friday roundup where I run down my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Look who it is! It’s John Cho!

The thing about John Cho is that whenever he pops up in something I’m watching I’m always like, “Oh, nice. It’s John Cho.” It’s especially true when he’s in a comedy, and it’s especially true when whatever he’s in is letting him give it the Full John Cho. I think you know what I mean when I say that. I’ll try to describe it anyway, even though it’s hard to make it sound like the compliment I intend it to be. John Cho excels at playing cocky pricks. Sometimes the cocky prick can be charming. Sometimes the cocky prick can just be, well, a prick. But even then, he’s so good at it that it makes the character fun. It’s kind of like the character he’s performing as is also giving a performance, a little nesting doll of acting. He just really excels at playing guys who are trying just a little too hard.

That’s why he was so good on Poker Face the other week. He played a smug career criminal, a slick conman who took pride in doing things the old-fashioned way. No internet scams or tricking people with text messages about unpaid toll fees. None of that… how do I put it…

Yes, that’s it. Thank you, John Cho’s character from Poker Face.

He was so good in the episode, such a great foil for Natasha Lyonne’s lie-detecting character, a guy so morally bankrupt and convinced of his greatness that it was deeply satisfying to watch him get baited into a switcheroo of his making. It made for probably the strongest episode of the season so far (right up there with Sam Richardson as a heist-obsessed movie buff, which felt like it was made specifically for me), helped along by a deviously twisty plot and a little heartbreak courtesy of Melanie Lynskey. But mostly, it was the John Cho of it all. I don’t know who else plays that character that well, honestly. Pompous and evil is a tough mix to pull off without teetering into cartoon villain. There’s a temptation there to try to make the character likable to soften the edges. But… nope. The man went wall-to-wall smirk and arrogance. And it was great. As you should have expected.

That’s not the only fun John Cho appearance this summer, either. He’s also popping up in Murderbot. Kind of. He plays the star of Murderbot’s favorite show, The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon, a kind of space soap opera Murderbot is a little addicted to and watches on its internal monitor when it is supposed to be working. I really can’t stress in strong enough terms how excited I get when the show full-on cuts to a scene from this fake show, in which John Cho plays an actor who is playing the captain of a spaceship. Think… think like if the writers from Days of Our Lives made a season of Star Trek. A screencap will help.

Again, here’s John Cho, now playing an actor who is playing a character who loves to deliver self-important lines of dialogue as though they are deep meditations on the human condition. The nesting doll adds yet another layer. I can’t wait to see how much further it can go.

I consider myself blessed to be gifted this surprise amount of John Cho this summer. I hope it keeps powering straight through into July. Have him pop up on The Bear as a smug restaurant critic. Roll him into Always Sunny as a new guy in town who wears sunglasses and drives Dennis insane. I’m willing to be flexible on the “how” here. I just need us to focus on the “when.” The summer of Cho must continue.

FOUR: lol I was so freaking invested in this Taskmaster challenge