Bad Thoughts, Worse Conversations With Your Partner

If you’ve ever been blue-balled by a trailer, you know exactly how I felt watching Tom Segura’s Netflix mini-series, Bad Thoughts. From the trailer, I expected something absurdist and edgy, maybe chaotic comedy flirting with surrealism. Instead, I got six episodes of what felt like hot garbage. Garbage that smelled worse the longer I sat with it. Each episode frustrated me more. I kept watching out of some twisted sense of duty until I gave up, mostly because I ran out of bleach to cleanse my eyes. And yet, right next to me on the couch, my boyfriend was laughing, full-on, belly-shaking cackling at every joke, every sketch. It felt like I was the problem for not “getting” the humour.

Before you grab your pitchforks, I know Segura has loyal fans. I’ve defended my opinion in debates with my boyfriend enough to know that. Even though Bad Thoughts didn’t work for me, watching it sparked something deeper: a reflection on how personal taste can feel like an attack, and how we sometimes fake interest in what our partners like because we know we're right to hate it

Let’s start with the show itself. The very first sketch was actually decent—punchy, absurdist. I even chuckled a teeny tiny bit. But that hope died fast. The rest quickly devolves into crude humor: poop jokes, tasteless disability punchlines, and blunt racial stereotypes. Not in a smart, boundary-pushing way, but in a lazy, lowest-hanging-fruit way. One sketch is just a man pretending to be disabled to skip work. That’s the whole joke. Another mocks interracial relationships with such clunky clichés that it made me cringe. It wasn’t just offensive, it was unimaginative. Satire should cut. This felt like someone mistaking shock for depth.

Episode after episode plays like a deleted YouTube playlist of inside jokes between Segura and his buddies. A recurring character, “Handsome Joe,” mostly brags about his looks while delivering creepy, racially-tinged one-liners about women. Another sketch features Segura interrupting and laughing at a disabled guest. The point seems to be that the host is ignorant, but it lingers too long to be a critique; it just leans on ableism for laughs. The structure doesn’t help. Sketches are loosely connected by a mysterious narrative with Segura as a morally bankrupt narrator. It fizzles out. A surreal twist involving an interrogation in a liminal space, maybe his mind. I thought this, but I'm not sure if Tom did.

What makes it all worse is how rare it is for comedians to get the opportunity to turn their sketches into a full-blown TV show. A series like this should be a playground for sharpening comedic timing, refining ideas, and building something layered. But Bad Thoughts felt like the opposite: a dumping ground for half-baked concepts that somehow escaped quality control.

I didn’t finish all six episodes, but my boyfriend did. He told me it “got really weird at the end, but in a good way.” I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was just trying to defend his taste. There’s a certain kind of fan blindness that kicks in when someone you admire serves you trash on a silver platter. You find ways to rationalize it. I call it confirmation bias, he calls it "you're crazy." Fans call it “experimental,” and that it’s “not for everyone.” But deep down, they're cringing.

And yet, there I was, questioning myself. Was I missing something? Was I too uptight? Had I lost my sense of humour? This silly show, of all things, made me spiral into a weird sort of identity crisis. Not just about the show, but about relationships in general. Partners are supposed to be compatible, so when they love something you absolutely hate, it messes with your brain. Suddenly, I was recontextualizing every little taste-based incompatibility we’d brushed off in the Honeymoon phase.

I realized how often I had tried to impress him by pretending to enjoy his taste in media. A few weeks into dating, he showed me Louis C.K.’s Netflix stand-up special. Problematic as he is, I actually found myself laughing at several moments. It was tight, confident, and well-timed. I thought, “Okay, maybe this guy has decent taste after all.” And maybe this relationship could work, so I kept going on dates.

Then came the Tom Segura gauntlet.

He spoke about Segura like a religious experience. He told me the best night of his life was seeing him live in Vancouver, how he laughed so hard he literally fell off his chair. I was jealous he had that kind of euphoric connection to a comedy show. I wanted to feel that too. I wanted to get it. So I gave Segura (and my boyfriend) another shot. We watched Segura’s Disgraceful special next, and honestly, it felt like a prank. A slow, agonizing prank that taunted me for choosing a partner who could think this was the peak of stand-up comedy.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t unwatchable. But it also wasn’t “falling out of your chair,” $300-ticket worthy. Eventually, my contempt was getting harder to hide. We got more comfortable with each other and started speaking our truths. He stopped trying to force me to watch full-hour specials and downgraded to showing me the occasional 20-second reel. Even that felt like too much.

This difference in taste made me reflect on my own obsessions and how they’ve shaped me. I love anime. I’ve been watching it since I was a kid. It defines so much of what I value in storytelling: surrealism, emotional nuance, and visual experimentation. Directors like Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Otomo made me want to be a filmmaker. Sharing anime with someone feels like offering up a piece of my soul. It meant a lot to show that part of myself to my boyfriend. But he didn’t like it. Even worse—he liked the wrong ones.

He enjoyed the generic action-heavy stuff, but when I showed him Perfect Blue or Paranoia Agent, he shrugged. Meanwhile, I was practically vibrating with emotion, explaining how these shows explored identity, reality, and trauma in ways Western media barely touches. It wasn’t that he hated anime. He just didn’t care about the ones that mattered to me.

And that’s the root of it, isn’t it? It’s not just about different tastes. It’s about feeling misunderstood. When someone dismisses the things you love, or worse, doesn’t even see why they matter, it can feel like they’re dismissing you. You start to question whether you're truly compatible. You start to wonder if you’re overreacting or if your standards are just too high. You try to like what they like, to meet them halfway, to prove you can hang. But deep down, you know you're pretending. Still, it's not always one-sided.

He sits through Gilmore Girls with me when I’m feeling down. At first, he didn’t get it, why the rapid-fire dialogue? Why does everyone talk like they’re on a 2000s podcast? But after a few episodes, he started to see what I saw. The comfort. The rhythm. The warmth of the world, even when it’s cheesy. He doesn’t binge it like I do, but he gets why it’s my go-to comfort show. That meant a lot.

And on the flip side, he introduced me to Denis Villeneuve. Before him, I hadn’t paid much attention to Villeneuve’s work. But after watching Incendies, Sicario, and Blade Runner 2049 together, something shifted. I realized Villeneuve wasn’t just some cerebral, visually obsessed director. He was exploring big emotions, grief, identity, and morality in a way that spoke to me. Now, he’s one of my favourite directors. My boyfriend was right about that one. Weird.

So yeah, sometimes we show each other things and it clicks. And sometimes we show each other Bad Thoughts. But it’s the act of sharing that matters. You want someone to see the world through your eyes. You want them to laugh where you laugh, cry where you cry, and get fired up about the things you love. When they don’t, it can feel personal, even when it isn’t. I don’t think my boyfriend and I are doomed over a Netflix special. We’ve found common ground in other shows, in other moments. But Bad Thoughts was a weird turning point. A moment where I stopped performing. Where I said, out loud, “Pookie, this sucks, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” And that small act of honesty made space for more honest conversations between us.

Sometimes, loving someone means knowing you won’t always laugh at the same jokes. It means accepting that your version of joy might not be theirs. But it also means not shrinking yourself to fit into someone else's punchline. And if you're really lucky, they’ll still laugh with you anyway, even if you’re watching different screens.

So I have to conclude this overshared article now because my boyfriend just said that he didn't want to watch The Princess Diaries with me, so he basically hates me.