So this premiered last week but I didn’t see it until watching two episodes tonight. I can’t say I’m impressed. The animation style is identical to King of the Hill, which is ok but somewhat boring. More importantly, the stories seem pretty similar to what was tackled in the previous Judge series, just from a somewhat different angle. See, this time the family are hippie/green liberals living in a redneck area! But they still had an episode about football already, and so on.
Plus, I think some of Judge’s stuff is hilarious but this show seems like the same concept as King of the Hill, namely taking a character he created for Beavis and Butthead and creating a variation of it as the central character in the new show. The central character in this, the dad, is very similar to the school teacher from B&B ,with pretty much the identical voice.
I saw the first couple of these as well, and it was…okay? I guess.
The major problem is that it seemed very obvious. All the characters are one dimensional caricatures. They’re hippies. Their son is a moron. Fine. King of the Hill started the same way, but it eventually had years and years to build the characters into something more than just the flat stereotypes of Texan behavior. This doesn’t have that history, and it doesn’t seem to be trying to solve the problem in any timely fashion.
The football episode seems like a good test case. To make the characters interesting, they’d have to fully overcome their liberal hippy squeamishness about it, allow their son (who’s a football savant) to play for the rest of his high school career, and probably learn that there’s value to the rituals of Texan high school football culture. Instead, it looks like it was a one-off joke episode, and there wasn’t any indication that they’ll develop that side of the character in the future.
The big problem is probably that, like King of the Hill, The Goode Family is absolutely about Texas. It’s ostensibly about the characters, but really it’s about Texas, and how it appears to outsiders. King of the Hill revealed that there was some value in the Texan point of view, which is an interesting thing to do. There’s nothing interesting in this show though.
Also, the son is named “Ubuntu”, and the father works at “Greenville Community College” (GCC). Groan.
