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Random Reviews

Episode #1: “ Broken” (FOX TV Show)

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Intro: Hey everyone. So for several years I have worked as an online commissioner and illustrator, now trying to find a stable job in graphic design. The job search has not gone nearly as well as I hoped, and so I am seriously considering creating video content instead while I continue to try for more “traditional” work. I already have a general concept for my videos, have two show concepts and have already recorded audio. So I thought I would practice my script writing skills by offering a quick review of the new FOX animated show House Broken.

I’ve always loved animation (what normal person doesn’t?), but I admit I have grown kinda’ picky when new shows are announced, especially when they all tend to look the same and have that awful, lazy Family Guy look and style. It seems like every animated comedy show that isn’t foreign or on streaming keeps trying to after Family Guy with this art style that I honestly just hate. (I’m not asking for or expecting Studio Ghibli levels of animation, but seriously can we just try and be more unique?) However, what attracted me to this show is not only that the animals are the stars and the humans are the backdrops, but also the show features a pretty nice variety of pets (though I still would have liked to see at least one reptile). I also like how the animals all view their humans and the human world.

At the time of writing this, I have seen the first and second episodes, “Who's a Good Girl?” and “Who Did This?” Prior to writing this, I have not looked at any other reviews of this since I don’t want my opinions to be affected.

First Contact: Gonna be honest, I didn’t really give the previews a decent watch because they honestly looked like crap. The only reason I stuck around to seeing the first episode is because it came on after Hell’s Kitchen, which I have seen every season of and thoroughly enjoy. However, House Broken didn’t leave me with too good a taste. The title itself borders on unfunny crass. (The original title for this show was Therapy Dog, which I think is funnier.)

Premise: So it turns out what I thought would be the weakest part of the show might actually be the strongest. The show takes place in a rather nice looking but still normal house where the main character named Honey runs a support group for animals. Now I think that is actually pretty creative, and it makes sense since most of these pets come from broken or dysfunctional backgrounds, such as this shabby gray cat coming from a crazy cat lady’s house and this corgi being abandoned at a notorious music festival. This for me is easily the best part of the show and brings with it the best chances for good jokes.

The show’s story also appears to be going for a continuing plot where Honey is having a hard time getting over the loss of a good friend and comes across this suave wild coyote in town whom she starts to develop feelings for. This is an interesting enough premise for this show and I am somewhat interested in where it goes.

Characters: I gotta say the characters are a very mixed bag. I’ll start with the mains and go down to secondary:

Honey: She’s a white poodle and the main character who runs the pet support group, sans a French accent. I really like Honey! I think she is a great main character, she’s likeable, relatable and tries her best to be informative and helpful to those around her despite her own hang ups (like always trying to live up to her owner’s expectations). I enjoy her interactions with the cool coyote guy and they feel mostly natural for someone who really wants to impress another person in a romantic way. I also like how she (the girl) is trying to woo the guy; this is a much- needed breath of fresh air from that tired cliché of the guy having to impress the girl.

Chief: After watching just the first episode I seriously grew to hate Chief. He is like a dog version of Peter Griffin: stupid, obnoxiously loud, unfunny, and actively ruins what are actually some very nice scenes involving Honey and the coyote. Every joke involving him in Episode One just made me more and more irritated, and I’m not an easily irritated person (I sat all the way through Transformers 1 and 3 without making a sound). And it wouldn’t be such a bad thing except they insist on having this character live in the same house as Honey, basically making him a secondary main character, so now we as the audience are forced to constantly deal with this bumbling brachycephalic dumbass in our faces all the time.

But then, something happened: I saw the second episode. It feels like after the first episode the writers had some misgivings on how they portrayed Honey’s constant companion and made the wise decision to actually have him do something very nice and charitable in this next episode. I won’t spoil what it is in case you haven’t seen it yet, but I gotta say it is rare that my mind can be changed so quickly on a character, going from loathing to kind just nodding my head and saying “Ok, that was really cool, you get a pass from me for now, Peter Griffin Dog.” So for now, I will just say that Chief is hit and miss, mostly a hit when it comes to being a nice guy and mostly a miss when it comes to jokes and everything else including his design.

Elsa: Easily the worst character after Chief. She’s basically the SJW/Tumblrina of the dogs and nothing she says is ever funny, only obnoxious, just like Chief. But unlike Chief who’s only saving grace is his generous nature and childlike mentality, Elsa has absolutely nothing going for her, she contributes nothing to the support group and only serves as a possible antagonist in the series at best. In fact, I wonder if that’s what the writers are planning. Even if it is, I still never see myself ever tolerating this insufferable twat.

Max: I like this guy! He’s the one character who tells it like it is and isn’t afraid to call the other animals out on their nonsense. He’s also one of the few characters who’s consistently funny throughout the show. I like that he’s based on an actual pig that actor George Clooney owned, except that pig was a Vietnamese Pot-Belly whereas this one is a Berkshire. Not sure why they changed breeds.

Diablo: Not a fan of this one. He has an interesting backstory (owners are splitting up and he’s passed back and forth in split custody), but he’s not that funny, he has an obnoxious shtick of wanting to hump random objects, and his voice and mannerisms are annoying and only make me want to punt him across the room.

Shel: This tortoise is such a lame one-joke character in this show. I guess the idea of him falling in love with inanimate objects is different and could be funny, but how long can this work and how many jokes can you really get out of this? It also relies on a rather old cliché of tortoises all being old; I actually think it would be funny if he was actually a teenager despite his age: it would make his constant amorous behavior make more sense and it would be a nice subversion to the old “tortoises are all old” shtick.

Tabitha: This character has a much better concept than someone like Shel: she is a former pure-breed Show Cat trying to adjust to the life of a normal pet. I don’t remember too many good jokes from her but I am willing to give her more time to develop. There’s a lot of potential jokes and commentary she can make regarding Show Animals.

Lyle (aka The Gray One): The first thing out of this character’s mouth was an unfunny sex joke, which quickly turned me off of him. However I do like his design and personality, and the second episode had a really nice and funny subplot involving him and the other cat Chico growing close as friends.

Chico: I do indeed like this character and find him to be very cute and likeable, but that might be partially because I grew up with a chubby tabby cat like Chico. Chico’s background is also kind of funny seeing as he is co-dependent on his owner who must constantly leave to go to work for long hours. The second episode of this series had a really nice and funny subplot involving him and Lyle growing close as friends.

The little umbrella-wielding slow loris-looking critter: Interestingly, I have not been able to find much information on who the little umbrella-wielding slow loris-looking critter is, but that’s likely because everyone forgot about it about as quickly as I did. All I could gather is it doesn’t talk and seems to have some kind of rivalry with Nibbles over the role of “the small fluffy pet”.

Nibbles: I honestly don’t know what to say about this character except that she is just another one-note character that I’m not excited to see more of. She’s not particularly funny and her backstory of her mourning the loss of her fellow cage mate by eating their face off is just so random and odd but not funny or interesting. Since this character is a classroom pet, the writers should focus more on all the potential jokes that can be said about a class full of dumb kids from an animal’s point of view.

Jill: She’s the human who owns Honey and Chief. She is also a therapist like Honey and I think that’s pretty cute. For the most part this character seems like a nice doting pet owner and she treats her animals right, which is good because the way this show looks I feared she would be some awful cruel-for-no-reason douche. However there is something she has planned for Honey and Chief that I have an issue with which taints this character for me. I'll cover what that is in the Writing Section...

Bubbles: Like too many of the others, this character is just so bland and so forgettable. She’s supposed to be a teenager who makes snide comments at the therapy group and likes making out with some statue in her bowl when no one is looking. That’s it? You could edit her out of the show and nothing would be any different.

Dat Coyote: Love this guy! He's a smooth-talker and suave but is also not a jerk about it. He seems to treat Honey well enough (so far) and I like the fun mystery surrounding him coming to town. I kinda’ look forward to where the show goes with him and Honey.

One thing I noticed about the characters that really bothers me is their uninspired names. Seriously, you named the tortoise “Shel”? You named the fish “Bubbles”? (To be honest I had a goldfish also named Bubbles but I was a child when I named her.) The other names are ok I guess, but I still think you could do so much better with what you have.

Writing: As far as a new animated comedy show goes, I would say the jokes in this were mostly pretty weak. A lot of them come down to the same stupid animal jokes you and I have seen before in many other shows, movies, comic strips and other media. “Ha-ha, the animals made a poop joke.” “Ha-ha, the gray cat made a thinly-veiled sex joke.” “Ha-ha, the stupid Saint Bernard dog made a returned-to-it’s-own-vomit joke.”

I swear, every time it seems like there is a decent joke the writers second guess themselves and feel like they have to explain the joke like the we’re all as dumb as pet rocks.

One particular joke involves Honey trying to say something meaningful to the therapy group, but that idiot Chief keeps running into the door; she finally yells at him to “drop the stick”! Get it, because he is trying to walk in through the doggy door while holding a big stick in his mouth, which you can see when he lifts his head to look at her through the window. Now that would be a pretty good joke on its own except that they have Chief stammer around and Honey tell him yet again to drop the stick, then he busts through the door anyways and the stick breaks in half. Now granted it is a little funny when Chief exclaims that he now has “two sticks”, but it comes at the expense of what could have been a better joke.

Jokes aside, one major thing that bothers me about the show’s story is the “forced marriage” of Honey and Chief. This whole thing makes no sense and feels really cruel: why is the human owner Jill doing this? Is she intending to breed Honey and Chief? If so, what would she gain from making mixed breed dogs when she has two different pedigree dogs, especially when one clearly has severe deficiencies? And I also hate the implication that Honey is somehow having an “affair” with the coyote guy when she and Chief are not married and are clearly just friends. This wouldn’t normally bother me so much because in real life some people marry their dogs together, it's cute, and the dogs are oblivious to anything because they are dogs. However when you go out of the way to anthropomorphize dogs and make them self aware in a TV show, the "marriage" thing stops being cute or innocent and it becomes really cruel and unfair to Honey. The show has no right to paint Honey as a “cheater” since she is not given a choice in being mated with Chief.

In fact, this whole “marriage” subplot could be cut out entirely and nothing would change or need to be changed in this show. The fact that Honey is having feelings for a wild animal is enough to create conflict in the show for the audience to care about. There simply is no need for this stupid "marriage".

One other thing that I think proves the weakness of this show’s writing is it’s handling of Honey’s deceased friend “Big Cookie”. We are suppose to feel emotional about Honey getting over this, but because we never get to see this character, get to know them, and get to see their friendship, we don’t care. We need to actually have time to meet and come to like Big Cookie in order to care about her death. This is poor writing that is unfortunately all too common.

Art Direction: I am going to try and be as fair on this assessment as I can, because as I mentioned earlier I hate these same cookie-cutter animated shows with circle-eyed flat-looking uninspired characters. However the first thing I noticed with this show is the backgrounds are actually rather pleasing to look at. There are plenty of nice bright colors and natural environments, this house feels like a place I would like to visit and just hang out with these animals (well, most of them). The shades and lighting of these environments also look nice; they appear to be colored with a nice cool color instead of just slapping black like in other shows like this.

As for the show’s opening: great visuals, terrible theme song. I believe every great show or movie has a great opening theme and song. Think of The Simpsons, South Park, Ren & Stimpy, MST3K, AAAHHH! Real Monsters, and so on. Even Family Guy has a great memorable opening! House Broken’s visuals do a decent enough job explaining the show’s premise, but that barking theme song is just cringe to me.

Final Score: Very mixed but has enough things in it to where I might keep watching and see where it goes.

Yes, I’m rather surprised at how actually not terrible this show is. I think this might be one of those examples of “don’t be so quick to dismiss something before seeing it”. House Broken is still saddled with some very annoying tropes from other actually-awful animated shows and I feel the writers need to stop second guessing themselves and just be confident. Don’t be afraid to be quick with the quips. Part of what makes a show re-watchable is catching some of those one-liners and references you might not have caught the first time around.

So that’s it for my first short review. Hopefully this wasn’t too much to read! (Hopefully I wasn't too harsh or missed anything.) Feel free to let me know what you all thought of the show.

Thanks for reading! - Mal