Playing the Victim Card: Signs and Satire in Adults on Hulu

FX’s Adults on Hulu follows a group of chaotic young adults living in Queens, crashing at a friend’s parents’ house and trying to fend for themselves. In the pilot episode, an old friend named Kyle goes viral on social media after coming forward about an experience of sexual harassment at work. His post launches him into unexpected visibility as an activist figure. Rather than responding with concern or solidarity, Issa, one of the show’s central characters, becomes visibly jealous of the attention he’s receiving and attempts to insert herself into his newfound movement. Issa shows up at a rally Kyle is hosting and asks if he wants someone else to speak on stage. He declines, flashing a literal “victim card” and explaining that she would need “one of these guys” to get through.

In response, Issa pulls out her own stack of identity-based cards: her woman card, her child-of-immigrants card, and her sex-worker card (she reads horoscopes on OnlyFans), and she convinces him to let her pass the fence and get on the stage. 

There’s a lot to unpack here. At its surface, the scene touches on a serious and emotionally charged topic: sexual harassment. Yet the tone is unapologetically comedic and irreverent. The fact that the primary response from Issa and her friends is not sympathy, but envy, highlights the show’s willingness to satirize the culture of social capital around activism and trauma. The absurdity of the moment in which she uses the cards as credentials to justify her place in the protest makes it clear that the show is poking fun at her and at the situation in general. 

By literalizing the idiom “playing the victim card,” the show cleverly plays with language and symbolism. The phrase typically carries a pejorative implication — that someone is using their suffering or marginalization for strategic gain — and by turning that metaphor into a physical object, the show foregrounds the transactional dynamics that can emerge in social justice discourse. The signifier — the “card” — is made absurdly concrete, but the signified — the social function of identity-based legitimacy — remains intact. The joke works because the audience already understands the real-world logic being parodied.

The moment raises questions about how identity is used as a form of access and authority. Issa’s eagerness to present her marginalized identities as qualifying credentials plays into a critique of the perceived “oppression Olympics,” where social power is recalibrated based on whose trauma is deemed most valid. The scene mocks performative allyship and attention-seeking behavior in activist spaces. Ultimately, Adults uses this scene to highlight the absurdity of commodifying identity and victimhood, particularly in online and performative activism. The humor is biting, and the show doesn’t attempt to offer any moral answers, but it highlights the messiness of how trauma, identity, and social recognition are negotiated in these spaces.