The World According to Jeff Goldblum

Jeff Goldblum is a colourful sort of fellow. But you probably already know that, being Internet-savvy meme-savant that you are. And that’s the Jeff Goldblum you get in his new Disney+ series, The World According to Jeff Goldblum. You get Jeff Goldblum in full technicolour glory.

The World According to Jeff Goldblum is a 12 episode series where Jeff Goldblum investigates all the wonderful things that make his mind go “oooooooo”. From sneakers in episode one, to ice cream, tattoos, and denim, to barbecues, gaming, bicycles, and swimming pools. The episodes are short half hour affairs and are easily digestible if Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum doesn’t get in your way.

More on that later.

For better or for worse, the series feels like the introduction to a particular topic. There is no deep dive here. No Discovery Channel extensive look into something. The series really is a primer that jumps around from conversation piece to conversation piece. I guess that’s what you’d expect from a show on Disney+ and not on National Geographic.

Here’s an example.

In the second episode of the series, Jeff Goldblum takes a look at ice cream and it includes a ride with an ice cream truck lady in Las Vegas to visit a nostalgia fest, a quick look at his childhood love of ice cream, another quick look at the history of ice cream itself, a run to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in Vermont to interview Ben and Jerry, then to Oregon to forage in the forest to create his own custom ice cream, then on to a battleship to serve his ice cream to the men and women in uniform. And all of this in 27 minutes.

That is what the show is. Each episode really feels like a collection of conversation starters. They will not give you all the information on a topic, but probably enough to get you interested. It might just spark something to get you to take a deeper look into something. Maybe.

Don’t get me wrong. The show is entertaining and more than watchable. There are animated asides that tell you the history of the topic featured in the episode. The multiple scene changes make the episodes fly and, despite not being extensive, the conversations are interesting. It keeps your attention, but in the end, feels like it doesn’t do enough with it.

And then there’s Jeff Goldblum himself.

Now, I love the idea of Jeff Goldblum. In fact, I’m listening to his Spotify playlist as I write this. (He’s a great jazz pianist.)

But here’s the thing about Jeff Goldblum. He is a colourful sort of fellow. And that colour can rub some people the wrong way and come off as being either disingenuous or an act. In the first episode, when told to run across a force plate in the high tech Adidas research facility, he’s asked, several times in fact, to not “bop”. You can almost sense the frustration (or maybe annoyance?) of the head researcher.

His energy, manic enthusiasm, and unbridled joy, is fun to watch but it all feels a little let down by the superficial nature of the episodes. It feels like the episodes could do without one or two of his jaunts. Sure, they sound like fun ideas on paper, but did I really need to see the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard?

A perfect example of this is when, in the first episode of the series, Jeff Goldblum goes to visit Jacques Slade, a YouTuber who unboxes and reviews shoes for his channel. Instead of spending time talking to Slade about the growing shoe culture, or after market sales, or exploding prices (he had already spent some time walking around SneakerCon earlier in the episode but still never really broaching the subject), Jeff Goldblum gets Jacques Slade, a man whose shoe channel on YouTube has almost 180 million views, to teach him how to do an unboxing video. And that is the entirety of Jacques Slade’s involvement in this episode. About sneakers.

It all feels frustratingly superficial. Like a human interest story in a news broadcast. And that’s what is most disappointing.

Unless this show really isn’t for me. This isn’t the show for me to watch Jeff Goldblum find, learn, and investigate something. Unless this is a show for a much younger crowd than me, to find, learn and investigate something.

For me, The World According to Jeff Goldblum was something I’d have on in the background as I played with my phone. It’s something I put on when I’ve had a crappy week at work (Editor’s Note: Which almost never happens because Goggler is amazing!) and want to just veg out with some pizza (or ice cream) on a weekend.

Or it could be something you put on to watch with your kids. It is a Disney show after all.