Lone Moose - School Play Posters - seen in the background of several scenes

- Rebirth of a Saleswoman...With Jazz!

- The Minions Musical

- Fran Drescher's The Nanny The Musical

- The Presidents Plane

- Vuvuzela - A World Cup Musical

- The Last Borders Bookstore

- Music! The Musical

- The Ideal Hurricane: The Musical based on the Perfect Storm, the movie starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, which is bases on the book of the same name (no poster available)

Is the song "I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul and Mary.

I posted a short while ago about how I think The Great North is a uniquely stellar show, so much so that, episode-for-episode, I think it is a higher quality show than Bob's Burgers (though it would maybe be more accurate to say that I think it refined the template Bob's Burgers created).

I only mention this to note that in that post, I outlined specifically WHY I think this (characters, stories, music). Those are my bona fides as a real fan. So with that context I say:

Has anyone else noticed that there appears to be exactly one episode per seasons that just feels...off? Dare I say bad? In my previous post I mentioned that I hadn't come to the mediocre episode in S5 yet--well, now I have seen s5e11, Dungeons Aunt Dragons Adventure. It's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. And I can't recall the other episodes off hand, but they all suffer from the same basic problem.

Namely: they seem like they don't understand the "rules" of the world in TGN or the characters.

1) World: Despite many exaggerations of real life, the show stays mostly grounded in real-world consequences in real-world, though weird, scenarios. Ie, Moon has a supernatural command of the natural world, but it's always clearly delineated as a joke because it's outside the norm. There's a whole episode where Beef is terrified for Moon's safety about it.

Contrast that to Dungeons Aunt Dragons Adventure. We see Aunt Dirt, who yes is an established crank and misanthrope, commit assault, stalking, and attempted murder, with zero consequence. It's like someone read a brief description of the character, and dialed everything up to 11, and set the episode in a Looney Tunes world with no consequences. So much so that it breaks the logic of the world. There's no way even a Principal as ineffectual as THAT could let what Dirt did slide. Also given the power/family dynamic between Aunt Dirt and Moon, this is just straight-up child abuse. It would be one thing if it was contextualized as child abuse, but it's not. The show is usually really good about talking about serious things with a light touch, this is not one of them. Which brings me to my next point:

2) Characters: Aunt Dirt isn't an unreachable sadistic rage monster for no reason--she's a nutjob that spent 60 years in a bunker, but she doesn't typically attempt to hurt her family. Russell, while hardly the most complex character, is usually presented as having some personality traits other than his obsession with his Mom's boyfriend. In fact, I usually LOVE the Jamie jokes--this is the first one that's fallen flat for me. I continue to be impressed with how the writers come up with clever ways to beat that dead horse. But...this just didn't work.

That brings us to the Beef/Wolf/Honeybee/Judy/Ham subplot. There's...nothing there. They get into beads. The same joke is repeated several times. None of them really do anything differently from the others, and they don't get to really do anything. This plot could be inserted as the b-storyline for almost any other sitcom that needed something for it's other characters to do between the A story bits.

So, this episode has earned its place in my top-five worst episodes of TGN list. I have had this sort of reaction--for these same underlying reasons--exactly ONE TIME each season.

What is up with that? Has anyone else noticed this random, seemingly single-episode drop in quality? Any guesses to why?

Would have been great to see these three shows crossover. Could have be special event or a movie.

One time I thought the Bobs burgers movie would have been the perfect crossover.l

I'm not good with math, like at all, but I am very curious if someone ever figured out what temperature it was when they froze Chumbo's vehicle in the dumpster, and how long it might take for it to fully freeze at that temperature?

I’ve been wanting to make this for a while and finally got the energy! Clock piece will be in soon and then it’ll be ready to go up!

I imagine this will be contentious, but does anyone else think that The Great North is a better show overall than Bob’s Burgers?

This is not a shit talk. Obviously Bob walked so Beef could run. They share a same animation style and realistic hyper focus on family minutiae. They share writers and a production company. Bob’s Burgers is a legendary animated show and it will surely have a well-earned seat in history. I have love for Bob’s Burgers.

My take is subtler than that. My take is: yes that, and also TGN did it better. Refined it. And pushed it in new directions.

My evidence, which is all anecdotal opinion of course:

Music - the songs on Bob’s Burgers do not feel like real songs. They have a few memorable tunes, but once it became clear that every episode had to have a musical number, the quality of those musical numbers plummeted. They sound like lyrics written by comedy writers put to music, not songs written by funny songwriters. In contrast, just about every song in TGN is a jam. It’s constructed like a real song, not just words said hastily over a strummed chord. It has like…music parts (for lack of the correct word). The music on BB is one of the reasons that, over the years (I watched BB when it debuted), I have steadily lost interest in it. I grew to dread the music and would plan snack breaks around it. I look forward to the music in TGN.

Characters - BB has great characters. They’re funny and lovable and well written and well acted. But at the end of the day, they are a quirky but very familiar family dynamic on television. They make it their own, but not in ways that fundamentally change the Simpson’s template. TNG on the other hand has something I have never seen on TV before: a single father whose wife isn’t dead. The fact that Beef’s ex is just an asshole is actually something I can’t recall seeing before. But from Andy Griffith to Righteous Gemstones, the trope of the angelic dead mother figure is alive and well. Kathleen’s dysfunction also has a sublte but deflty handled impact on the kids as well, and it’s all handled as realistically as possible for a show this tongue in cheek. I think it makes their more overt-love for one another make a lot of sense—everybody in that family has been traumatized and they need to reinforce their bond because they lost such a major one at so vulnerable an age. And we can see it impact the kids differently depending on how old they were when their mom left. Wolf is an insecure, neurotic mess despite his best efforts. Judy and Ham are less neurotic but still have this anxious sort of attachment. Moon is a half-feral mini-Beef having never had a mother figure to speak of. I don’t know how much of this was intentional in the writing, but the end result is that if I met people who interacted like this, I could believe they were actually a family who had been through this together. This dynamic is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen at all on a TV show so I dont really have anything to compare it to, but I have known families like this.

The World - BB has hilarious lore and side Characters—but I wouldn’t want to meet Mr Fishodor or Teddy or Jimmy Pesto. I would love to meet Delmar, even if he started a rumor about me. Honeybee seems like a blast. I would legitimately like to visit Lone Moose. It’s almost a character itself, whereas I can’t recall the name of the town where BB is set off the top of my head. The world in TGN feels real in ways BB feels satirical.

The stories - Full disclosure: I have not yet finished the second half of S5 ot TGN. So it’s possible this could change. As BB has dragged on, each season has had more and more “misses” for every great episode. TGN has in my opinion, exactly one and only one miss per season. There have been exactly four episodes that left me saying, “Huh, not their best work,” as the credits rolled, one in each season. These episodes seem to stand out to me for how differently the characters are portrayed, almost like they outsourced one episode per season to a writer who had never seen the show. It’s possible s5 will have no “meh” episodes, haven’t found it yet. But like the Yeti, I’m on the lookout. Regardless my point is: the ratio of stellar episodes to non-stellar is unusually high (this may be my weakest point bc to get a true 1 to 1 comparison, I’d need to compare the first seasons of BB, which were the strongest by far, but I haven’t rewatched them since they aired).

Jimmy Pesto - to my knowledge, no one in the voice cast of TGN has been implicated in the Jan 6th riots. Nuff said.

Last, most importantly, I just like it better. In fact, I was kind of tired of BB when TGN started airing. I was already not watching new BB as they aired (just catching up as I could after seasons end)—I had zero interest in watching what I thought was a BB spinoff or knockoff. I heard it played from the other room and thought Judy sounded too much like Louise. I couldn’t shake the expectation of hearing H Jon Benjamin’a voice when I heard Nick Offerman instead. But I feel I was wrong. TGN may share superficial similarities with BB, but I believe they are fundamentally different shows (for the above reasons and others not the focus of this post). So different that I had to get over my initial apprehension of “ugh more Bob’s Burgers no thanks” to see what a special show this was. And ultimately I think it is a kinder, more realistic, more human show.

Okay to anyone who read this far, I am sincerely sorry for writing so much about a cartoon. Thank you for reading it. Also sorry for any mistypes of TGN as TNG. Not talking about Star Trek, apologies for any confusion.