Network: NBC; Genre: Animated Comedy; Content Rating: TV-PG (for some language and sexual content); Classification: Contemporary (Star range: 1 - 4);
Season Reviewed: 1 season
"(The Today Show) is the Cadillac of morning shows. It consistently beats the competition in all key demographics and Katie Couric has that good-girl-but-probably-wild-in-the-sack thing going on."
A poke in the ribs at a network's insistence on referencing only NBC shows or a blatant NBC cross-promotion taken over the top to make it just sound like a joke? I'm not sure. That kind of jaw-droopingly transparent product placement and cross-promotion is all over 'Father of the Pride' - NBC's surprising venture into prime-time adult animation. Forgive me for being leery of a show apparently created by Dreamworks Co-CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, but when your show looks more like a Coca-Cola advertisement then 'American Idol', it's time to pull back a bit or risk having it be seen as a tool.
Puns, name-dropping and a few recognizable celebrity names touting the star power behind the animated voices 'Pride' has all the earmarks of a Dreamworks/PDI project. It is a semi-revolutionary series, actually the 2nd behind UPN's seen-by-nobody 'Game Over', as a weekly CGI-animated show. PDI (Dreamworks' animation house and the poor man's Pixar) having made movie hits out of such disposable fair as 'Ants', 'Shark's Tale' and the 'Shrek' series bring all those elements to TV. John Goodman! Cheryl Hines! Orlando Jones! And Carl Reiner! All selected demographically to appeal to every member of your family! You won't see them but you will hear the hell out of them! All of this blares from the show's advertising campaign to it's intro ('Viva Las Vegas' sung by Goodman himself) in true PDI fashion.
'Pride' centers around a family of exotic white lions living in a refuge in NBC standby location Las Vegas to be used in the magic shows of well-known magicians and masters of the impossible Sigfried (Julian Holloway) and Roy (voice chameleon David Herman). There is bumbling, head-of-household Larry (Goodman), his pleasing but no-nonsense wife (Hines, 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'), their son Hunter, rebellious daughter Sierra and, of course, the cranky, wild-card predictably shocking, father-in-law Sarmoti (Reiner).
They're all animals in this refuge, but the joke is - I guess - that they act like people. So instead of seeing Goodman (or Kevin James) going through these familiar sitcom stories we see lions doing it. Close you're eyes and listen to Goodman and Hines talk and you will notice nary a difference. Every once in a while the show turns its premise into something creative, but even then its something like relating catnip to teenage pot experimentation. Such wit. If 'Pride' is a revival of adult animation I don't know how 'adult' it is. Even with some references to raves and animal sex I still can't imagine how this would trigger a V-chip on the strictest setting. Puns have never been considered sophisticated "adult" humor.
A lot of the material in the show is funny in theory. In theory, it's funny that Sigfried and Roy sit in a chair and throw gas bombs to the ground so they can be standing when the smoke clears. It's funny in theory that everywhere they go they bring a tape recording to play their theme song. It's funny in theory that Danny DeVito provides the voice of a radical right wing lobster who faces impending doom so that Barbra Streisand can have a lavish meal. But none of this stuff is able to elicit a laugh. Most of that, I think, is a side-effect of the animation style.
CGI (or Computer Generated Imagery , for all the 12-year-old's up past their bedtime who think this show is the epitome of "adult") animation is still relatively new and the show's animated actors are too stale and mechanical. They lack the nuance, comic timing and execution of a human actor as well as the intimacy that has developed with hand-drawn animation. In time this will surely be improved as hand-drawn animation has, but right now these characters are only able to execute the broadest of gags, sending a well-meaning joke veering off it's target eliciting a knowing nod, but never a laugh. To date, my favorite joke in the show has Siegfried and Roy talking to each other over intercoms and the writers giddily jump on the opportunity to reference Alexander Graham Bell's famous first words. Now, that's fun. If the rest of the show could go for more references executed with that level of subtlety instead of tired, old Sigfried and Roy gags we might have something here.
From a purely visual standpoint the show is delicious to look at. The movements of the characters (as well as the "camera") inside their setting are fluid beyond anything in traditional animation. This illusion gets shattered though when you look around and really notice how bare the family house is. It recalls the bare walls of the Flintstone's home during the dawn of hand-drawn animation and reminded me that we are in the middle of something of an animation revolution. Of course, 'The Flintstones' isn't exactly known for being funny either.
I doubt 'Pride', or any CGI animated series for that matter, will survive long enough in this current network-driven TV climate to make a classic. Aside from the fact that there aren't enough furries, ravers or people who think Katie Couric would be wild in the sack on the face of the Earth to keep this show alive. As long as the production cost of these type of shows remains astronomical, and networks are placing more emphasis on cost then on ratings or potential audience growth, these shows will never be able to flourish.
However, I wouldn't stick my flag in the ground and fight that battle with this lame show.
* ½
Season Reviewed: 1 season
"(The Today Show) is the Cadillac of morning shows. It consistently beats the competition in all key demographics and Katie Couric has that good-girl-but-probably-wild-in-the-sack thing going on."
A poke in the ribs at a network's insistence on referencing only NBC shows or a blatant NBC cross-promotion taken over the top to make it just sound like a joke? I'm not sure. That kind of jaw-droopingly transparent product placement and cross-promotion is all over 'Father of the Pride' - NBC's surprising venture into prime-time adult animation. Forgive me for being leery of a show apparently created by Dreamworks Co-CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, but when your show looks more like a Coca-Cola advertisement then 'American Idol', it's time to pull back a bit or risk having it be seen as a tool.
Puns, name-dropping and a few recognizable celebrity names touting the star power behind the animated voices 'Pride' has all the earmarks of a Dreamworks/PDI project. It is a semi-revolutionary series, actually the 2nd behind UPN's seen-by-nobody 'Game Over', as a weekly CGI-animated show. PDI (Dreamworks' animation house and the poor man's Pixar) having made movie hits out of such disposable fair as 'Ants', 'Shark's Tale' and the 'Shrek' series bring all those elements to TV. John Goodman! Cheryl Hines! Orlando Jones! And Carl Reiner! All selected demographically to appeal to every member of your family! You won't see them but you will hear the hell out of them! All of this blares from the show's advertising campaign to it's intro ('Viva Las Vegas' sung by Goodman himself) in true PDI fashion.
'Pride' centers around a family of exotic white lions living in a refuge in NBC standby location Las Vegas to be used in the magic shows of well-known magicians and masters of the impossible Sigfried (Julian Holloway) and Roy (voice chameleon David Herman). There is bumbling, head-of-household Larry (Goodman), his pleasing but no-nonsense wife (Hines, 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'), their son Hunter, rebellious daughter Sierra and, of course, the cranky, wild-card predictably shocking, father-in-law Sarmoti (Reiner).
They're all animals in this refuge, but the joke is - I guess - that they act like people. So instead of seeing Goodman (or Kevin James) going through these familiar sitcom stories we see lions doing it. Close you're eyes and listen to Goodman and Hines talk and you will notice nary a difference. Every once in a while the show turns its premise into something creative, but even then its something like relating catnip to teenage pot experimentation. Such wit. If 'Pride' is a revival of adult animation I don't know how 'adult' it is. Even with some references to raves and animal sex I still can't imagine how this would trigger a V-chip on the strictest setting. Puns have never been considered sophisticated "adult" humor.
A lot of the material in the show is funny in theory. In theory, it's funny that Sigfried and Roy sit in a chair and throw gas bombs to the ground so they can be standing when the smoke clears. It's funny in theory that everywhere they go they bring a tape recording to play their theme song. It's funny in theory that Danny DeVito provides the voice of a radical right wing lobster who faces impending doom so that Barbra Streisand can have a lavish meal. But none of this stuff is able to elicit a laugh. Most of that, I think, is a side-effect of the animation style.
CGI (or Computer Generated Imagery , for all the 12-year-old's up past their bedtime who think this show is the epitome of "adult") animation is still relatively new and the show's animated actors are too stale and mechanical. They lack the nuance, comic timing and execution of a human actor as well as the intimacy that has developed with hand-drawn animation. In time this will surely be improved as hand-drawn animation has, but right now these characters are only able to execute the broadest of gags, sending a well-meaning joke veering off it's target eliciting a knowing nod, but never a laugh. To date, my favorite joke in the show has Siegfried and Roy talking to each other over intercoms and the writers giddily jump on the opportunity to reference Alexander Graham Bell's famous first words. Now, that's fun. If the rest of the show could go for more references executed with that level of subtlety instead of tired, old Sigfried and Roy gags we might have something here.
From a purely visual standpoint the show is delicious to look at. The movements of the characters (as well as the "camera") inside their setting are fluid beyond anything in traditional animation. This illusion gets shattered though when you look around and really notice how bare the family house is. It recalls the bare walls of the Flintstone's home during the dawn of hand-drawn animation and reminded me that we are in the middle of something of an animation revolution. Of course, 'The Flintstones' isn't exactly known for being funny either.
I doubt 'Pride', or any CGI animated series for that matter, will survive long enough in this current network-driven TV climate to make a classic. Aside from the fact that there aren't enough furries, ravers or people who think Katie Couric would be wild in the sack on the face of the Earth to keep this show alive. As long as the production cost of these type of shows remains astronomical, and networks are placing more emphasis on cost then on ratings or potential audience growth, these shows will never be able to flourish.
However, I wouldn't stick my flag in the ground and fight that battle with this lame show.
* ½