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Home Front: Culture Wars
Times TV critic looks down patrician nose at new ABC show
2009-05-27
Sounds like a winner to me. Let's find the Times buzzwords, shall we?
Like “South Park,” “King of the Hill” arrived in 1997 as one of the indelible culture-war comedies of the Wal-Mart versus Williams-Sonoma era. Created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, “King of the Hill” forged a brilliant neutrality, affectionately portraying the common-sense, ranch-house life of a Christian family in Texas while mocking provincial mediocrity enough to appease the yen for regional condescension on the coasts. You could love it in Cambridge; you could love it in Little Rock.
Something you could discuss with the peasants over a domestic beer perhaps...
Everybody won until everybody didnt: just a few days before the November presidential election, Fox canceled the animated series after 13 seasons, its ratings in decline, testament perhaps to a national exhaustion with values-bashing, even when the weaponry produced few scars and little bloodshed.

Mr. Judge, though, apparently still feels the gentle combatants calling. His new animated comedy, “The Goode Family,” created with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky (beginning on Wednesday on ABC), shoots from a different tactical angle, similarly striving to alienate no one. As if he had been required by the Federal Communications Commission to devote equal time to jeering at liberal pieties (which, by the way, he did plenty of on “King of the Hill”), he has produced the Goodes, a family of zealot, vegan, recycling nut cases who dont fight over paper versus plastic because they believe in neither.

"I know a lot of people are comfortable shopping with reusable bags,” Helen Goode (the voice of Nancy Carell) explains as she piles her groceries into her arms in the checkout line of a pseudo Whole Foods. “But Im not. Theyre made in sweatshops.” The Goodes have a dog named Che who leers at rodents because he isnt allowed to eat meat, and an adopted teenage son named Ubuntu (David Herman) who they thought was black but who turned out, once they got him from South Africa, to be the blond child of Afrikaners.

To compensate for Ubuntus racist lineage, the Goodes dress him each day as if he were being sent off to a parade in honor of Nelson Mandela. His brand-new drivers license identifies him as African-American.

When he apologizes for using too much gas during his initial spins around town, his father assures him that it is not really the consumption that matters: “Its O.K., Ubuntu, whats important is that you feel guilty about it.”

The voice of the patriarch, Gerald Goode, an administrator at a community college where even students qualify for tenure, is provided by Mr. Judge, who could not have improved on his tone of narcoleptic earnestness if he had apprenticed for “All Things Considered.” He is exceptionally funny in the role (as he was playing Hank in “King of the Hill”), and a lot of the writing is too.

But the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?
Ah, yes. Those halcyon days of the 90's, when global-warming skeptics abounded. Not like today, when everthing is Hope and Change and Obama...
Mr. Judge, who remains obsessed with the absurdities of political correctness, still has his head very much in the Clinton years, and it is possible to watch “The Goode Family” feeling so thoroughly transported back to another time that you wonder where all the Monica Lewinsky jokes went. Sometimes youve just got to grab your cup of free-trade coffee and move on.
I may give this a look.
Posted by:tu3031

#1  Waiting for the complements from Linux users...1, 2, 3.
Posted by: Eric Jablow   2009-05-27 21:30  

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