PILOT REVIEW: Bless the Harts

BLESS THE HARTS

Starring: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Jillian Bell, Ike Barinholtz

Created by Emily Spivey
Written by Erin Wagoner, Directed by Pete Michels

I haven't had to review many cartoons in my near decade of doing this blog and I'll give a full disclosure - I'm not a fan of animated shows in general. I haven't really liked one since Doug. I've never seen a full episode of The Simpsons or Family Guy. So, I will fully admit that I had a bad attitude going into FOX's newest entry in the Animation Domination lineup, Bless the Harts.

Bless the Harts seems to be trying to exist in the same type of world where shows like Parks and Recreation have thrived: small town USA. Filled with eccentric personalities and some oddball local politics, I can see what they're going for here. The problem is, it is not executed well. Instead, we have a bunch of cheap laughs and some recurring jokes that land incredibly flat (don't even get me started on the Colin Powell jokes. What is this, 2004?) It says something when a gimmicky thing like Jesus as a character wasn't the worst part of the show.

One of the major premises of the episode was that Jenny (Kristen Wiig) kept trying to sell her mother, Betty's (Maya Rudolph) collection of Hug n' Bugs and Betty kept buying them back. That's all well and good except that joke and major plot point doesn't actually work. Where exactly was Jenny mailing these things to if she knows where the storage unit and Betty lives with them? Things like that bug me on sitcoms because they sacrifice credibility just to make a joke. There were other ways they could have made that joke work and they took a lazy way out.

Whenever there's a genre that I'm not really into, I am always curious to hear what people who liked the genre think of a new show. I'm biased against Bless the Harts partly because this is just not the type of show I'd be into even if it was done well. But when my wife was watching alongside me and I commented that I had never seen an episode of The Simpsons or Family Guy, she said that this show was "not as good as those."

WILL I WATCH IT AGAIN?
Nope. But I've still seen more episodes of Bless the Harts than some of FOX's iconic animated shows.