Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I’ve still got a healthy buffer of film reviews to share with you all, but my house has also burned through a fair number of TV productions lately, so I figured it was about time for a recent series roundup. No, it’s not anime, you cheeky scamps – we’ve mostly been watching American cartoons and recent streaming additions, as we continue to chip away at the post-Flapjack dynasty of modern animation. Churning through top quality western animation has become another house tradition at this point – two years ago we burned through Avatar, Adventure Time, and Steven Universe, and had a great time with all of them. Last year was basically consumed by our One Piece watch, but this year we’re back in force, having knocked out Regular Show and Gravity Falls in the last few months. Let’s break ‘em down!
Regular Show occupied the bulk of that viewing time, on account of it being both extremely long and not particularly good. Unlike all of these other productions, there isn’t really an “ongoing narrative” to Regular Show – it’s basically just an absurdist stoner sitcom, centered on two slackers who work at a private park. Any given Regular Show episode will basically proceed as a mix of Clerks and Trailer Park Boys for two-thirds of its run, and then some insane supernatural thing happens and our heroes have to resolve it.
Regular Show continues like that for over two hundred episodes, occasionally leaning into some romantic drama for one of its leads, but mostly just offering slackers hanging out and getting yelled at by their boss. I frankly wouldn’t have gotten through the show if it was just me watching – but my housemate took to it more than I did, watching a lot of it on his own time and making that massive catalog significantly more manageable.
The show has a couple genuinely funny seasons in its early years (along with a preposterously generous licensed song budget), but by the end it’s piling nonsense lore on top of nonsense lore, applying dramatic narratives to gimmick characters who clearly can’t bear their weight, and rehashing the same ‘80s movies riffs ad nauseum. It’s not a bad show by any means, but it’s inconsequential and repetitive and lacking in meaningful emotional beats. Still, if you try an episode and enjoy it, take heart: there are two hundred more episodes exactly like that one for you to enjoy.
After the disappointment of Regular Show, I was eager to check out Gravity Falls, which by reputation stood as the cryptid/horror-themed entry in this western animation renaissance. While Regular Show took us many weeks to plug through, Gravity Falls lasted about six days, owing to it being both short and extremely fucking good.
Obviously it’s no surprise that as a horror fan, I’d be a natural sucker for the horror entry in this wave of quality cartoons. But Gravity Falls really is the full package: a strong cast, compelling episodic narratives, gripping series-long hooks, and excellent art design to bring it all home. The show centers on Dipper and Mabel Pines, a pair of twins who are sent to live with their Great-Uncle Stan, the proprietor of Gravity Falls “Mystery Shack.” Along with store employees Soos and Wendy, the twins swiftly discover that Stan’s attractions are the least menacing thing about Gravity Falls, with dark secrets and terrifying monsters seemingly lurking around every corner.
The first episode’s narrative provides a fine demonstration of Gravity Falls’ unique mix of horror and comedy. When boy-crazy Mabel gains a new boyfriend, her brother becomes convinced the guy is actually a zombie, drawing on lessons gained from a mysterious quasi-Necronomicon he discovers. But in the end, it turns out her boyfriend isn’t a zombie at all – he’s actually five gnomes in a trench coat, who are collectively intent on making Mabel their Gnome Queen. After Mabel rejects their advances, the gnomes assemble into a giant monstrosity that I swear to god is a riff on Clive Barker’s In the Hills, The Cities, before eventually being defeated by our intrepid twins.
Based on that episode alone, I felt assured Gravity Falls could do justice to both its comedy and horror DNA, and the show never disappoints. Monster hunts are woven gracefully into personal stories, relationships develop naturally over full seasons, hilarious one-liners abound, and moments of genuine horror frequently lean further into the macabre than I’d ever expect from a Disney production. Mabel being played by Kristen Schaal (Lois from Bob’s Burgers, among many other roles) is perhaps the show’s greatest single asset, as Schaal might just be the funniest voice actor in the business. But there frankly aren’t any weak links here – the cast is likable and relatable, the monsters are alternately terrifying and hilarious, and there’s always a sense of forward momentum, as Dipper steadily uncovers the darkest secrets of Gravity Falls.
If anything, I felt Gravity Falls was almost too focused in its narrative, which is a complaint I never thought I’d make. The show is composed of two twenty episode seasons, and there is absolutely no fat in that lineup – in fact, the whole second half of the second season is essentially one continuous narrative, focused on directly confronting the show’s final antagonists. I would have actually loved to see a second largely episodic season that embraces the shift in dynamics between the first and second season, giving us a bit more time to settle in with the townsfolk before the riotous finale. I mean, how can Pacifica, who is basically an Onpu-tier gremlin of a character, only get one and a half episodes fighting alongside our heroes!? Of course, the fact that I’m still hungry for more is likely a testament to the fact that creator Alex Hirsch made the right choice, and ended his series at the peak of its power. The frustration of wanting more time with this world will fade – what remains is an essentially perfect run of forty charming, spooky, and altogether excellent episodes.
Along with these “prestige cartoons,” we’ve also been watching the latest seasons of The Umbrella Academy and The Boys. Well, I say “watching,” but in the case of Umbrella Academy it’s more like “having inflicted upon me,” as the show hasn’t really been watchable for well over a season now. Having spun through multiple end-of-world conflicts and rearranged all the relations of its central characters several times over, every new episode of Umbrella Academy is simply unknowable people doing random shit for fifty minutes or so. It’s essentially the soap opera approach to characterization, where characters are less a collection of defined (or, god forbid, developing) personal characteristics, and more just an amalgamation of momentary alliances and preoccupations. If you enjoy shows where things happen on the screen, Umbrella Academy certainly clears that bar, but if you’re hungry for anything of meaning in terms of character, drama, or consequence, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
On the other hand, The Boys feels as relevant, focused, and furious as ever in its third season, dispensing with anything resembling metaphor in order to explicitly underline America’s ongoing downfall. Homelander is Trump with laser eyes, both utterly confident in his greatness and absolutely desperate for public approval. Over the early episodes of this season, he fights a covert media battle against his detractors, with only the threat of losing his popularity keeping him contained. But he soon gets fed up with smiling for the crowd, and ends up going on a public rant about how unfair the media is, and how tired he is of limiting himself for the sake of his inferiors – which, of course, absolutely skyrockets his ratings among his natural base. And so, unconstrained by any need to appeal to people with decency, Homelander proceeds to solidify his grip on the MAGA crowd, while simultaneously realizing that public approval or approbation are both fake concepts. As our own supreme court has been so eager to demonstrate, it doesn’t matter if you’re loved if you hold all the cards – power is power, and the only limitation binding society’s winners is their willingness to exercise it.
Along with that ferocious political drama, The Boys still offers plenty of its variably puerile and grotesque attractions, burning and disemboweling its way through a whole slew of new victims, and also offering an episode called simply (and accurately) “Herogasm.” Garth Ennis’ love for grindhouse sex and violence has never done anything for me, but also doesn’t significantly detract from the show’s emotional impact, and actually finds a genuinely compelling vector in the demands Homelander inflicts on his subordinates.
Homelander actor Antony Starr is The Boys’ far-from-secret weapon, a man who can express in two quick creases of his cheek an intent to fold you into your own rib cage. In Starr’s hands, every Homelander scene is as frightening for us as it is for its characters, a perpetual act of smiling tightly and praying it’s not our time. I’d have preferred for this season to rearrange the board a bit more significantly, but its focus on hashing out the fundamental unhealthiness of the cast’s relationships still felt like a perfectly valid choice, and the show still feels like it’s building towards an appropriately catastrophic punchline. If you can stomach its squishier indulgences, The Boys remains the most engaging and thematically incisive entry in the superhero genre.
