In the name of all that is good and holy, please let FOX get this wretched mess off the air and give us the promised second season of the vastly superior "Bob's Burgers" already.
I'll give anything animated a fighting chance, but after watching three episodes of this crap I can safely say that not only is "Allen Gregory" not nearly as sharp or witty as it's creators apparently consider it to be, but it's one of the most aesthetically unappealing animated series ever. Jonah Hill needs to stick to live action films.
Visually unpleasant animation (seriously-this show is ugly to look at)combined with characters who are more often than not creepy (and not in a comedic way)produces a relatively laugh-free result which manages to neither be hip or walk the cutting edge of being subversive. It's simply bad. People praising this are reading a level of sophistication into the humor that isn't there. For all of the flack that "Bob's Burgers" has gotten from certain quarters, at least it possesses an element of genuine wit as well as heart.
Rude, boundary-pushing humor can be done successfully.. "South Park" has been a sterling example of this for well over a decade now. But there's an intrinsic difference between pushing boundaries with a sly grin as a cracked way of making a valid point (or ridiculing some absurd aspect of our culture) and just being flat out mean spirited
"Allen Gregory" ,with it's repulsively cold tone, falls squarely into the latter category. Watching this show is a miserable experience. This series asks us to laugh because characters are uncomfortable..not because there's a sharp, observant thread of underlying humor to their discomfort, mind you, but for the simple reason that they are suffering. Two noteworthy examples of this are the horribly miscalculated scenes in the earliest episodes where Allen's stepfather acknowledges that he's not gay and is in a relationship Allen's dad because the father is "a creeper who wouldn't quit" and an entirely bizarre and humorless moment where the resolutely unlikable father threatens to make life miserable for the school principal when she refuses to engage Allen's romantic aspirations. While there probably are viewers who got some sort of a chuckle out of these moments, my reaction was to stare at the TV,puzzled, wondering when this damned thing was finally going to generate some laughs.
And, hey, congrats to the writers who, with the advent of Allen's father, managed to conceive one of the worst gay television characters in the history of the medium. These people need to take a few days and watch multiple episodes of the (exponentially funnier) series "Soap" so they can get some sort of a clue as to how to write a reasonably plausible gay character, a feat that was successfully navigated with a role which made Billy Crystal a star some thirty years ago.
Better yet, just skip the history lesson and cancel this regrettable misfire. It really astounds me that this ever made it onto television.
I'll give anything animated a fighting chance, but after watching three episodes of this crap I can safely say that not only is "Allen Gregory" not nearly as sharp or witty as it's creators apparently consider it to be, but it's one of the most aesthetically unappealing animated series ever. Jonah Hill needs to stick to live action films.
Visually unpleasant animation (seriously-this show is ugly to look at)combined with characters who are more often than not creepy (and not in a comedic way)produces a relatively laugh-free result which manages to neither be hip or walk the cutting edge of being subversive. It's simply bad. People praising this are reading a level of sophistication into the humor that isn't there. For all of the flack that "Bob's Burgers" has gotten from certain quarters, at least it possesses an element of genuine wit as well as heart.
Rude, boundary-pushing humor can be done successfully.. "South Park" has been a sterling example of this for well over a decade now. But there's an intrinsic difference between pushing boundaries with a sly grin as a cracked way of making a valid point (or ridiculing some absurd aspect of our culture) and just being flat out mean spirited
"Allen Gregory" ,with it's repulsively cold tone, falls squarely into the latter category. Watching this show is a miserable experience. This series asks us to laugh because characters are uncomfortable..not because there's a sharp, observant thread of underlying humor to their discomfort, mind you, but for the simple reason that they are suffering. Two noteworthy examples of this are the horribly miscalculated scenes in the earliest episodes where Allen's stepfather acknowledges that he's not gay and is in a relationship Allen's dad because the father is "a creeper who wouldn't quit" and an entirely bizarre and humorless moment where the resolutely unlikable father threatens to make life miserable for the school principal when she refuses to engage Allen's romantic aspirations. While there probably are viewers who got some sort of a chuckle out of these moments, my reaction was to stare at the TV,puzzled, wondering when this damned thing was finally going to generate some laughs.
And, hey, congrats to the writers who, with the advent of Allen's father, managed to conceive one of the worst gay television characters in the history of the medium. These people need to take a few days and watch multiple episodes of the (exponentially funnier) series "Soap" so they can get some sort of a clue as to how to write a reasonably plausible gay character, a feat that was successfully navigated with a role which made Billy Crystal a star some thirty years ago.
Better yet, just skip the history lesson and cancel this regrettable misfire. It really astounds me that this ever made it onto television.