After several weeks of reruns and frequent checks to TV.com’s episode guide it appears that I’ve finally seen season one of The Boondocks in its entirety. First and foremost, The Boondocks is one of the few comedies on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim that actually seems difficult to produce, which was what initially got me hooked. The animation is absolutely top-notch, and I’d go as far to say that it’s one of the three best-looking shows on television (behind Thief and The Sopranos) in terms of visuals. But when the series premiered last January the first few episodes didn’t seem to have all that much punch behind them, and if you weren’t familliar with the comic strip it was hard to figure out the character’s motivations. Either way, it seemed to me that the series got lost in the shuffle. Maybe that wasn’t actually the case.
The Boondocks is about two young black boys, Huey and Riley, who leave urban Chicago to go live with their grandfather in the suburbs. Huey is a young revolutionary while Riley is a young gangster. Grandpa, voiced by John Witherspoon simply wants to live in a nice part of town. It’s takes a handful of episodes before the characters come into their own, but the last eight (or the total 15) provide commentary more biting than anything on The Simpsons, South Park, or even The Daily Show. The show covers a myriad topics (all current though not based on news of the day like South Park) such as gentrification, celelbrity criminal trials, the death penalty, corporate greed and one particularly ballsy episode in which Martin Luther King Jr. wakes up from a coma and sees what his civil rights work has accomplished.
And did I mention how great the art on this show looks?
One more interesting sidebar. I couldn’t have last forever, but it’s sad to see the Sunday-night block of comedy on Adult Swim in such dire straights. Granted, I’m sure it still pulls in the ratings, and perhaps more importantly appeases stoned dorm-dwellers, but now that the original cast has taken a back seat to the likes of Squidbillies, Moral Orel, Forty-Ounce Mouse, Robot Chicken and episode after episode of Family Guy, it just isn’t that funny anymore. Well, perhaps that’s not true, but the type of comedy has gone from funny-smart-weird, to weird-random-funny. I kind of blame the later seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a show that I like for its madness, but which had to keep pushing the bounds in order to maintain surprise the same way a crack head says he needs $20 and “will only do this once.” It worked fine for Aqua Teen, but it also artificially inflated the randomness of just about eveything else they air leading to the block’s current configuration of nonsequiturs and pop-culture. What happened to just writing jokes?
Mad Skilz.
