Narrated by Bell, the moments chronicled in what Bryan Menegus of Gizmodo calls a "hypnotizing tour" throughout a "post-capitalist dystopia[n]" landscape of stores and shopping centers that went out of business during the early-to-mid-2010s' so-called "retail apocalypse".
[7] Bell employs salvaged commercials, VHS tapes, retro-futuristic imagery and sound, and audio-visual collages and montages, underlying the uneasy themes.
[8] The intros of episodes in the series often use clips of these videos that have been distorted or exaggerated in a surreal effect.
Can you imagine filming this and taking it back to the [1980s] and saying, 'This is what's going to happen in 30 years: There's going to be a frog in the food court'?
[1]Steven Kurutz of The New York Times compared the series with its soothing voice-over and retro-synth vaporwave music to Michael Galinsky's time-capsule photo book Malls Across America, stating, "they evoke the same fuzzy '80s nostalgia[,] even as they offer an unsettling visual document of the retail apocalypse that changing consumer habits, e-commerce and economic disparity have wrought.