Disenchantment (First 10 Episodes)

So I'll be upfront, I am not an avid watcher of The Simpsons or Futurama. I've casually watched episodes here and there when they're on TV but I just didn't have the connection with those shows as other people clearly have. However, I do know and respect the name Matt Groening, so when it was announced that he was coming out with a new animated show on Netflix, I was ready to be floored. I think a lot of people were and I think that's Disenchantment's first mistake. I think the hype for the show was too high and people came in with expectations that were too high to actually meet. There are a lot of issues with Disenchantment that I will get into, but that's the first one by far.

Disenchantment takes place in a medieval fantasy world, mostly in the kingdom of Dreamland. It centers on three characters, Princess Tiabeenie or Bean (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), an oblivious elf by the obvious name of Elfo (voiced by Nat Faxon), and a devious spirit named Luci who has committed to be Bean's personal demon (voiced by Eric Andre).

The three of them come together to get into misguided adventures as Bean is an alcoholic misfit who doesn't want to conform to the expectations of being a princess, put on her by her father, King Zog (voiced by John DiMaggio). King Zog wants to extract the magical elf blood from Elfo to create the Elixir of Life and that is a continuing plot throughout the first ten episodes.

I should mention that Netflix only released the first ten episodes of the twenty that were ordered. I'm not sure if that means that the first ten episodes are season 1 and the next ten are season 2, who knows. Doesn't really matter.

The thing I want to figure out is what exactly makes this show so lackluster for me. As I mentioned before, I'm not an avid watcher of the Simpsons or Futurama. I like to thing I got the understanding for those shows and knew what made them funny but one possibility is that I just didn't understand that humor and I'm just missing what makes this show funny. What I think is more likely is that I did watch enough and I'm just comparing this show (perhaps unfairly) to The Simpsons and Futurama setting the expectations too high.

I won't say there are no funny bits in Disenchantment, but I thought about it quite a bit a couple hours after I finished the last episode and the main take away from my viewing experience is, I really have no idea what the whole show is really about. I really couldn't remember a huge take away I'm supposed to take from those 10 episodes.

Bean is neither particularly funny or memorable, she's just a drunk and is a screw up, constantly achieving only disapproval from her father who is an obnoxious screw up who's only interested in keeping power. I can really only remember one or two lines or moments from both of these characters that got a chuckle out of me. And their family dynamic is pretty lackluster as well. They go a little too hard on the fact that Bean doesn't care about what her father thinks so it doesn't even really make sense when they try to create some semblance of touching moments between them.

The show also really doesn't know how to create a meaningful serious moments. One of the few things I did retain from the season was the last few episodes where they delve a little bit into the tragedy these two are dealing with. But neither one of them are serious enough for me to really appreciate their tragedy and how it relates to their relationship. On top of that, I don't care enough about either one of them to appreciate how the tragedy affected individually, so a lot of it is lost, especially when they throw in a joke before it gets too serious.

And then you have Elfo and Luci. And I will give the show some credit, these two are probably the best part of the show. Elfo is an elf who leaves his world to come to the human world and he's so uneducated about what reality is like that there were a couple of moments where his stupidity was really funny.

And then you've got Luci who is a vaguely powerful demon who's sole purpose is to be the devil on Bean's shoulder telling her to do the wrong thing. He's almost always apathetic to what's going on and always acts in his own self interest that there are some parts where his character can be kind of funny.

However, both characters have flaws that prevent them from being really interesting and really funny.

In the case of Luci, his character design is so simple that there's not a whole lot of physical humor to come out of him. Almost all of the humor comes from Eric Andre. Andre is a funny guy, but I don't think he's given a strong enough script to really make Luci that interesting or extremely funny. On another note, Luci is so apathetic at times that he becomes more of a heel on the plot. While his apathy is funny at times, just as often its just annoying. Moreover, his character isn't always consistent because he's sometimes forced to disregard that apathy, especially the more a "friendship" develops between the three.

And then there's Elfo. Now I think Elfo's problem is more that he's not the main character. He plays second fiddle to Bean who is not nearly as interesting or funny. Elfo grew up in Elf land and is essentially the ignorant fish out of water. In the first episode he comes across a battle and inadvertently causes a lot of death and avoids his own demise out of sure luck and coincidence. This was a funny scene.

But as the show goes on, Elfo just feels like an out of place character and is almost too stupid for the plot.

But most importantly, the show has a very inconsistent tone on whether or not these characters are really searching for anything. Sometimes they seem very content with just drinking and hanging out. And if every adventure was them just falling into it or them reluctantly going into it, I would be fine with that. But then they throw in episodes where it seems like they're pointing to an underlying desire that they never really seem to have.

All three of the main characters (and the supporting cast) all feel like unique characters you might find around the town of Springfield, but they all lack a sense of centrality or underlying conflict.

The other aspect that felt odd about this show was that there were only 10 episodes. And maybe this is a personal preconceived notion but when a show only has 10 episodes, I feel like each episode needs to feel important. I liken those really good ten episodes animated series to ones like Rick and Morty or Bojack Horseman. Each episode feels special, and each episode has something to say.

Disenchantment felt like each episode was just another episodic outing. The stakes never feel really high and the characters feel like they return to status quo by the end of the episode. Which would be feel more natural if this was a season of 24 episodes, but when its only 10 episodes, it feels like it was intending to say more than it actually did.

The truth is, I can't honestly remember much of anything about the past ten episodes I watched. The episodes felt so inconsequential for the most part and overall the show just didn't have the same impact I've come to expect from other animated shows I've been watching recently, especially from Netflix.

Comparing this show to something like Bojack Horseman is impossible because there just seems to be a lot more work put into the writing of an episode of Bojack Horseman than Disenchantment.

To be fair, Bojack is trying to achieve a different goal, but the point still stands that whether its a drama with comedy sprinkled in like Bojack, or an episodic Simpsons-lite misadventure of the week like Disenchantment, Bojack accomplished its goal and then some with how refined the humor can be at times. Disenchantment misses the mark and stumbles when it tries to add drama to something that it doesn't feel compatible with.

Is Disenchantment the worst show out there? No, but it's not a high bar when you say something is not the worst thing I've ever seen. It has its moments where I was entertained. It pulled out some funny voice actors from time to time and if you're a bigger fan of animation, you'll probably recognize and appreciate the voice acting more than I did. One of the only voices I really recognized was Matt Berry from the IT Crowd and he and his Noel Fieldings were criminally underutilized.

I think the thing that bummed me out the most was that I wanted Disenchantment to be good. I think a lot of the disappointment it garnered from Matt Groening fans was that it wasn't an instant classic like The Simpsons or Futurama. For Netflix viewers like me, the disappointment might have been that it wasn't Bojack Horseman. But I think the biggest disappointment was that I just wasn't that entertained by it and it didn't leave much of an impact. I don't need it to be a drama disguised as an animated comedy like Bojack, I just wanted some entertainment and I can't say that happened with Disenchantment. Ultimately the show was at best okay, and at worst boring.

But that's my opinions only. What did you think? Did you like Disenchantment? Do you think it reached the potential of The Simpsons or Futurama? Do you think its been fairly critiqued? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @MovieSymposium as well as send me your requests for films and TV shows I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter, you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

Thanks for reading.