In a 2019 Smithsonian magazine feature titled “The Snakes That Ate Florida,” Ian Frazier went long on how the Everglades has been overrun by Burmese pythons, imported as exotic pets and then abandoned once they grew past the cute-baby stage into the 200-pound, “will eat anything they can get their mouths around” stage. “No one knows how many pythons are out there now. Estimates run from 10,000 to perhaps hundreds of thousands,” Frazier writes. The snakes are out of control, and in its smartest moments, the class-conscious Peacock series Killing It links the insatiability of a species with no natural predators and no sense of when enough is enough to capitalism as a failed system, run by one-percenters, influencers, and racists who also have no natural predators and no sense of when enough is enough.
It’s an abstract comparison, but Killing It draws incisive observations out of its first absurd setup — a hunt to kill those pythons, with a $20,000 reward — and the increasingly silly ones that follow over its ten-episode first season, all of which is available to stream today. In nearly every episode, a working-class protagonist made hapless by the extreme gaps in our economy is paired with someone whose schemes and lies have secured them success. An immigrant working nine jobs to get by is hired to impersonate a wealthy woman trying to scam the IRS; a scrappy…
