K-SCORE: 7
Creators: Roger Black, Waco O’Guin
Starring: David Herman, Tom Kenny, Roger Black, Jerry Minor, Daniel Tosh, Kaitlin Olson, Natasha Leggero
Spoiler Level: Minor
“there’s really no reason to watch Brickleberry”
For some reason animated comedies think that they can brutalize their characters and have far more offensive jokes (both in quantity and degree of offensiveness) than regular comedies. Generally speaking, I’m fine with that, but Brickleberry fails because they add that “no accountability” factor to the equation. Nothing has shock value when characters don’t actually suffer real consequences for their actions. Even in an animated show, you can’t reset the circumstances back to exactly where they started at the beginning of the series every single episode and expect your audience to continue to care about their shenanigans. Family Guy suffers from this as well, and to a lesser extent South Park, but unfortunately Brickleberry suffers most just because it’s the least funny. If a TV series is crappy, you can keep watching just because you’re curious what happens next. If there’s no connection between what’s happening now and what will happen next, you lose that. So there’s really no reason to watch Brickleberry.
“the talking bear cub adopts a homeless man as a pet”
It’d be impossible for me to list out the absurd and/or horrifying things that happen to the characters and mostly I didn’t care enough to mentally catalogue them as I lazed along the Brickleberry trails, but I know that at one point the hideous overweight lesbian gave birth to the antichrist and at another point the talking bear cub adopts a homeless man as a pet and walks him around on a leash. I hated every single character, and that extends to the ancillary characters as well. There’s nothing that original or funny about a redneck racist or a sleazy stripclub owner. By far and away the best episode is the one where the majority of the cast is locked up in a mental institution because they keep citing previous things that have happened to them on the show and the doctors don’t believe them. (Consequently this same concept makes for the only really good episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that gets about a hundred thousand percent more adoration than it deserves.) The show was also funny once when it made fun of Jonah Hill. That's about it.
The damn thing seemed to be at war with itself because of the network it was on and the kind of content it wanted to be produce. Basically every episode had censorship bars, which just feels odd when you're watching the pornstachioed boss coming as close as possible to statutorily raping his just-18 secret daughter. Is it really any better if your show has no cursing if the content features the whorish hypocrite female park ranger having sex with a donkey in public? Surely the creators know that their show has no integrity, right? If that's the case, why change voice actresses for said whorish hypocrite? They went from Kaitlin Olson to Natasha Leggero, seemingly hoping no one would notice. Why not just kill off that character or dismiss her somehow and draw a new one?
Part of me wants to accept and acknowledge that Brickleberry is just another show at the ass-end of an era of Comedy Central slush, only appealing to those with drug-addled minds or immature teenagers, and another part of me wants to say, “no, stop making this kind of thing.” Even potheads should hold themselves to a higher standard of entertainment.