The 'Neo Yokio' holiday special is an anti-colonialist fever dream

Netflix’s Neo Yokio gets funnier when you remember that in addition to being the frontman of Vampire Weekend and a capable storyteller, Ezra Koenig is an Ivy League troll.

He’s the guy your friend is dating, who finds a way at least once per birthday party to allude to that time he went to Columbia, or that thing he did at Columbia, or this weird TA he met at Columbia. It would be grating, but as far as your bestie’s boyfriends go, he’s probably the coolest one she’s dated for longer than three months. You just forgive him for it, and you let him tell his stories.

As Ryan Mandelbaum pointed out in his review of Neo Yokio’s first season, the hyper-capitalist lifestyle of Kaz Kaan and his friends seems to deliberately invoke the class specificities present in real-life New York, as filtered through the experience of the Ivy League.

Its holiday special, Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas, does an admirable job of leaning into that Columbian influence (the story’s frame begins with a robot butler invoking the first lines of Homer’s Odyssey) while also... dismantling the concept of classist, colonialist empires.

Pink Christmas’s story takes place outside the canon of Neo Yokio, as everything that happens only occurs as part of a story Kaz’s butler makes up on the fly. The special uses that narrative freedom to get bolder and trippier than the first season, which relies more on satire to get its message across. Where Neo Yokio asks viewers to laugh at the idle rich, Pink Christmas has carte blanche to violently and irrevocably take them down.

Pink Christmas also introduces a new character in Kaz’s aunt Angelique, who may or may not actually exist in the universe of the actual show. Angelique is the hard-assed aunt Agatha’s bohemian twin sister, who instantly endears herself to the audience when Kaz offers to take her bags and she responds with “hell no, motherfucker” while being otherwise lovely to her nephew.

Angelique’s refusal to indulge in the same luxuries the rest of the Kaan clan revels is provides a window into Neo Yokio’s underlying message (and also, let’s be real, the entire fucking world’s underlying message) that extreme wealth is never really earned. When a big reveal at the end of the episode alludes to the inherent immortality of the elite, it’s Angelique who comes through with the truth.

There are plenty of things that make Pink Christmas a holiday special worth watching. Koenig wrote a new song for the episode that Jaden Smith gets to rap on in character as Kaz Kaan. There’s some funky animation going on when Kaz takes a drug-fueled sidestep into the demon realm. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree becomes animated and attempts to take out half of midtown like an enormous, festive Godzilla. And of course, there’s the ending, which no one should spoil in the name of Christmas.

Even if you missed Neo Yokio last year, it’s worth it to catch up to Pink Christmas. What even are the holidays without a charming tale of familial discord, stolen land, caprese martinis, demon hunting, and electric bass jams? Boring. The holidays are boring without them.