“I wanna ride bikes, and catch snakes, and do kid stuff forever.” – Joel
I’m hardly going out on a limb by saying that FX’s new animated comedy, Unsupervised, will be compared (probably for its entire run) to MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head. On the surface, this comparison makes sense. Both animated series — which more or less share a similar visual style — are about teenage boys without adult guidance trying to navigate adolescence, and more importantly, trying to score with chicks. Oh yeah, and one character has brown hair, while the other is blonde.
<div>But that’s really where the comparisons end. Unsupervised is not Beavis and Butt-Head 2.0 (which, of course, <a href=”http://tvgeekarmy.com/post/tag/beavis-and-butt-head”>already exists</a>), nor to does it seem to be trying to.
Unsupervised is about, Gary and Joel, a pair of clueless fifteen-year-olds with too much time on their hands and too little parental supervision at at home. Gary is voiced by Justin Long and Joel by David Hornsby. Apart from the two leads, Unsupervised has an extremely deep bench of voice-actors taking over the duties of minor characters. Familiar voices that pop up here and there include Kaitlin Olson (of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), Romany Malco (Weeds, 40 Year Old Virgin), Kristen Bell (of my wildest fantasies), and Fred Armisen (Saturday Night Live, Portlandia).
The biggest differences between Unsupervised and Beavis and Butt-Head are tone and the general outlook of Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, which has become synonymous with cynicism. Judge’s projects go out of their way to skewer pop-culture, societal institutions, and more than anything else, his characters. Beavis and Butt-Head are funny, but they aren’t necessarily likable. And the rest of the characters on the show — Mr. Anderson, Mr. Van Dreissen, Principal McVicker, Coach Buzzcutt, and so on — are nearly always hateable.
Unsupervised kind of has the opposite thing going. Gary and Joel, however misguided and naive, appear (at least in the first episode) to be extraordinarily likable. Sure, they might do dumb shit sometimes (or maybe all of the time, I guess we’ll just have to see), but their behavior and actions seem to come from a place of genuine goodness. With a couple of exceptions, the same can be said for the supporting characters we meet in the pilot. It appears at first glance that Beavis and Butt-Head’s biting cynisism has been swapped out for Unsupervised’s innocence.
The problem is — unlike Beavis and Butt-Head — Joel and Gary aren’t particularly funny. I smiled a lot during the pilot, but I can’t recall laughing very often.
This “genuine goodness” trait that the characters on Unsupervised exhibit comes as quite a surprise to me, given the pedigree of the shows creators. Unsupervised comes from a creative team featuring David Hornsby, Scott Marder, and Rob Rosell, who have all worked on another little FX comedy that perhaps you may have heard of: It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Anyone who has seen even one episode of IASIP knows that there is not one iota of “genuine goodness” in any of the characters on that show. In fact, “unadulterated evilness” would probably be a more apt description of Dennis, Mac, Charlie, Sweet Dee, and Frank.
While I didn’t necessarily love Unsupervised’s pilot, I did like it very much. I’m confident that the writers — talented as they may be — will figure out a way to make the jokes land more gracefully. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with spending a half-hour with a bunch of likable characters voiced by a top-notch cadre of actors.
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This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.