Animation Round-Up: The Awesomes, BoJack Horseman, Fugget About It

Small disclaimer here: Not everything on my blog is created equally. Entries vary by how much thought into them, how confident I felt about my analytical and putting-words-together skills, and the simple matter of time constraints. In other words, I'm not entirely sure this entry measures up to my other ones and I especially am conscious of this because I told several AV Club commenters who I met in real-life (along w/my boss at my retail job) to check out my blog, and I advise them all (as well as potential employers) to skip to the next entry if they want to see me supremely pwn the blogosphere with my critical mastery. At the same time, I did go through the trouble of putting some words down and I view this blog as a sketchpad for my critical thoughts. Why delete them?



BoJack Horseman

The rap from several reviews I've read on this show is that it fits in more with the height of the Adult Swim reign of animation and not the intelligent cartoons of today like "American Dad" or "Archer" (I’d insert Bob’s Burgers in here except I personally don’t agree with the assessment of the show as amazing).

The show stars Will Arnett as a washed-up actor (who also happens to be a horse, more on that later. I promise) 20 years after his heyday (or should I have gone with hay day for the easy pun?) as the star of a TGIF-like sitcom.

"BoJack Horseman" suffers from a slow start out of the gate with a couple substandard episodes and that is generally all the time a critic can give a show in a TVscape as crowded as this one.

The pilot episode, heavy with exposition (which is understandable), zeroes in on protagonist BoJack Horseman before all the character development kicks in and he's as uninteresting as a seemingly irredeemable jerk can be. The jokes and pacing are somewhat awkward here.

The second episode tries to mine humor out of a taboo topic: Political correctness and how we regard the military as heroes and not only fails. When handled well (See "30 Rock") something like this kills but it just paints BoJack as somewhat of a buzzkill a la one of the Crane brothers (from the Frasier era, NOT Cheers) at a Tiki bar (or pick whatever plebian setting you want to complete this analogy).

The show's primary gimmick-- anthropomorphicizing (I wrestled spell check for a while on that one) the characters in subtly clever ways and mixing them into the human world-- is enough to pique one's interest during the early episodes but if one quits the series early, that's all they'll find: An only occasionally funny Hollywood satire that's been done before.

"BoJack Horseman" isn't particularly easy to get into, but a few episodes in, the show's pathos and interesting character dynamics shines through. Like Will Arnett's previous work, "Arrested Development," the show features characters who aim to be dynamic and get out of their ruts in life. Unlike "Arrested Development" however, the show dares to give them, and us hope, at actual improvement and toys around with the idea of whether the characters are going anywhere at all. Either way, there's a definite investment to the characters by season's end that gives the show life.

The satire also starts getting sharper once the hidden jokes and the parallels to ABC's TGIF line-up of the 1990's start to reveal themselves. People might not notice on first viewing how spot-on "Horsing Around" gets.

The character dynamics also offer a lot. Mr. Peanut Butter (another TV has-been who happens to be a dog and is a great people pleaser) as a mirror universe version of BoJack and the two have an odd rivalry that occasionally bleeds into friendship.

Awesomes:
The latest to get in on the superhero parody trend is Seth Meyers who developed this show during his days in the writer’s room of SNL. Apparently, he still has room for the show in a busy schedule that has included running the SNL writer’s room and launching his own talk show in the last 12 months.

In the superhero universe of “The Awesome”, the world is overwrought with superheroes who are heavily regulated by a bureaucracy that subdivides superheroes into classes. At the bottom of the barrel class is our mild-mannered hero Prock (Meyers) who compensates for his lack of an effective superpowers through intelligence (Prock stands for Professor Doctor). When Prock's dad, a highly revered God-like superhero, announces his retirement, Prock begs him to take over but must build a team from scratch.                        

The superhero spoof genre is becoming pervasive enough that it's hard not to notice overlap between any number of movies or TV shows including "Sky High", "Mystery Men" and "The Incredibles." At the same time, the more superhero stories pervade our TVs and movie screens, the more room there is for entries in the superhero spoof subgenre to find their niche.

The show is capable at times of being clever which is what's to be expected from a self-professed comic book geek and SNL head writer.

The problem is generally that many of the characters are weak and uninteresting and those characters take up a lot of the screen time. Taran Killam plays a one-note redneck speedster, Keenan Thompson plays a mama's boy who sounds like Kenan Thompson always does, Rashida Jones is little more than the girl-next-door who makes the protagonist lovesick, and Bobby Lee plays a boy who turns into sumo wrestler. His character being the kid on the team seems like it has some potential to be any sort of character dynamic but it's quickly dropped (ed. note: I wrote this review before the Sumo-centric episode) .

Ike Barinholtz is moderately potential-filled as the sidekick, and a lot of the more interesting characters come from outside the superhero team: Bill Hader as supervillain Malocchio and Josh Meyers as rival Prock..


Interestingly enough, a couple of SNL's writers Emily Spivey and Paula Pell voice characters here. Pell's character is equally one-note with a moderately gross angle about an old woman being sexy and Spivey's character, a super-secretary of sorts with a charming Southern accent named concierge, is the kind of character who feels like she belongs in a more well-rounded cast.

The second season takes a few more risks and branches out in a few more directions. So far, none of the episodes have left any lasting scars like the episode last season in which Barinholtz's muscleman is dragged into a paternity suit with an alien race and it's revealed he has a thing for houseplan----oh God, I don't want to talk about it anymore (This episode made the 26 worst of the 2013-2014 season list by The AV Club).   The funniest running gag to date is Rashida Jones' Hotwire coming back to life in disguise and awkwardly attempting "Dudespeak" around former love interest Prock.

While the show is moderately watchable, it still has to work extra hard to convince us it's not just something that the "Saturday Night Live" cast threw together between the Wednesday night read-through and Friday's rehearsal.

Fugget About It

A hitman for the mob goes into witness protection and hides out with his family in Regina, Saskatchewan. The show gets down and squicky in a way that cartoons are allowed to get away with these days: Blood and guts usually feels more comic in animated form, although is it really necessary? The show is watchable and has its moments but the show suffers heavily from being in a genre where it's hard to differentiate oneself from the many imitators that have come before it.

Whereas "The Awesomes" gets away with genre humor (or rather genre parody humor) because the thing being parodied is continuing to evolve and comprise an increasingly large share of the cinemascape, the mob parody film has been done to death.

From "Analyze This" (or for that matter, everything Robert De Niro has done since "The Score") to "Kiss Me Kate" (I'm referring to the play, although I believe there's a movie or three?) to "Bullets Over Broadway" (once a movie, now a Broadway play, will probably get a movie eventually), mafia parodies are as old as time.

While the show even has some pretty ambitious plots (the elder daughter joins a menomite clan in one, the Queen of England accidentally comes to Jimmy's house, etc.) and delivers on them with satisfying comic execution but with a genre like this, the show falls well into the "comfort food" category of viewing.

Looking at some of the 2013 shows that didnt measure up

I just posted my Top 10 List along with an Honorable Mention. On top of that, I include a list of shows that I watched so someone reading my Top 10 List will know what it was up against because no critic watches everything. In that respect, I'd like to also review 2013 by discussing some of the shows that fell short of being considered by myself for the year's best TV:

The Crazy Ones-It's a somewhat dependable sitcom and the Robin Williams/Sarah Michelle Gellar is a great pairing. I'll never understand the school of thought that Robin Williams is kind of annoying instead of a supremely talented guy who is among the most gifted comedians out there. Though I'd place myself in the top 10% of the population in terms of how much they like Robin Williams, even I found him a little redundant here. The show also loses points for having one of my last favorite stock characters: The lothario who is effortlessly irresistible to the opposite sex. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that it's supposed to be his comic trait and there's nothing that inherently funny about a guy who uses women like he does. Amanda Setton is clearly a talented actress but she isn't used particularly well here (ironically, I think she fit in better on "The Mindy Project") and she's given her character a weird tic of making every line of dialogue sound like a nervous question (perhaps she's trying to get on the cast of "Whose Line is It Anyway?").

Brooklyn Nine-Nine: This was a great addition to my weekly schedule for several weeks but the show had some irritating traits that eventually cancelled out the show's strengths. Andy Samberg does not make a believable cop (or a likable character for that matter) which begs the question: If the show's sole function is as a vehicle for Andy Samberg, why place him into TV's most overused genre when he doesn't fit into it? While some of the side characters (this show could win a diversity award for best Latino cast on TV) and relationships are excellent, the show lacks any sort of grounding upon which to build comedy. The comic tone is geared so much towards one-liners and quick gags, it feels more like vaudeville than a multi-layered source of laughs.

Modern Family-The show is high enough in quality to have merited honorable mention every year thus far, but by this point, the show has used up nearly every bag of tricks at its disposal. At this point, how many more hidden talents can Cam reveral? How many more revelations can there be that Jay's really a softie? How many more times can Alex surprise Haley by climbing her way up the social ladder? Hasn't she had her first boyfriend three times by now? This is not a fault of the show as it's doing what it is designed to do: Produce consistent and interchangeable episodes so that it can make a killing in syndication. I would happily watch this show five years from now when it turns up on the TV on a random afternoon and I still watch it now. It's just no longer event viewing.

The Sing-Off-It was probably right around #11 the last time it came on in 2011. Since the Sing-Off came back from the brink of cancellation, it acquired a new corporate producer in the form of Sony Television which made a few small changes that ended up making the show worse. I thought seven episodes was the optimal number but I didn't feel like I got the chance to know most of these groups. More backstory was needed and the swan songs, Ben's blog and the post-performance camera chats might have helped that.

The Awesomes (Hulu)-Seth Meyer's newest venture, the show got off to a great start and seemed to find something unique to say in the now overcrowded genre of superhero spoofs. I still watched it all the way through but the plots lost a little firepower after a while as certain plot motifs started repeating themselves (i.e. no one catching onto Malocchio's plan, Prock having a crush on Hotwire, Muscleman dealing with his inferior intellect in comparison to Prock) in ways that didn't build. Of the eight superheroes, I found only about half to really hold my attention as interesting characters. Coincidentally, that's the same hit-miss ratio as SNL sketches so, hey, at least Seth is consistent.
 
Alpha House (Amazon)-Based on an article from the New York Times, the show about four Senators sharing a house in Washington is a premise winning enough to get a good bidding war and the necessary amount of hype to kick off Amazon's original content platform. The show is pleasant and breezy through the first three episodes. At the same time, it's somewhat underwhelming due to the fact that it seems episodic in tone with little serialization. It almost seems like the remnants of a multi-camera sitcom. It's also worth noting that John Goodman seems to be recycling some of his old roles for the lead character (I see some traces of Evan Almighty, Flight, the Babe and some of his  Coen brothers films). He is a bit grumpy, a little lazy, and that's about it. This is is even more disappointing considering that most standout shows in the Golden Age of TV have incredibly strong protagonists. The upside is that the show has a lot of potential for good plots as there's a lot of amusing situations I can imagine placing four senators in. In the third episode, for example, they go to Afghanistan on a fact-finding trip for self-serving reasons. Although I was disappointed that they were in Afghanistan only in the episode's third act, it had potential.


My disappointments with Lilyhammer, Scandal, American Horror Story, and 1600 Penn are covered elsewhere on this blog.