April 4, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
Half of Home Movies‘ Coach McGuirk is alive and well and living it up on this show. Read on.
The aforementioned Loren Bouchard created and developed Bob’s Burgers with King of the Hill alumnus Jim Dauterive; for both writers, environments and relationships preclude premise and storytelling. So unsurprisingly, I’ve encountered—and sympathized with—fans of FOX’s Sunday-night lineup who’ve been reluctant to embrace Bob’s Burgers’s admittedly weak exposition. For starters, the pressures of a family-owned fast-food joint feel like fodder for a high-concept studio film that can squeak a few winking innuendos past a PG rating. Furthermore, the show’s pale, crayon-like color palette and five-o’-clock-shadow fetish seem to lazily amalgamate King of the Hill’s doodly aesthetic with Arrested Development’s instantly recognizable orange-on-white branding strategy. (The theme to Bob’s Burgers even prominently features a ukulele.) Despite all this sputtering, however, the half a season thus far aired has been a welcome attempt on Bouchard’s part especially to fuse Home Movies’s interpersonal orientation with more traditional situation comedy.
The offbeat family dynamic is the show’s greatest asset: The lesson, refreshingly, is less that “We’re okay even though we’re weird” and more “We’re so weird that I don’t know how we’re surviving, but fuck it.” Bob is the most normal of the gang, with his chosen occupation a seeming plea for wholesome sanity; his scrawny, adenoidal wife, Linda (John Roberts), and stand-up comedian-voiced children Tina (Dan Mintz), Gene (Eugene Mirman), and Louise (Kristen Schaal) are enthusiastically antisocial. In one episode, Linda attempts to convert their apartment above the burger restaurant into a bed and breakfast despite the building’s low-rent urbanity; when her few guests turn down offers of wine, cheese, and board games, she unleashes an aggressively needy cheerfulness.
Read the rest at Slant.
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