Brickleberry’s season premiere follows the gang as they prepare for a visit from Barack Obama himself. Because of a murder-related accident, Woody and Steve have to learn to live together long enough for Woody to get his coveted award. Connie has to fend of the advances of a jilted lover from the past. Bobby and Bodean learn that reforming the healthcare system isn’t as easy as it looks.
The President is coming to Brickleberry! That should be fun, right? You get to throw a lot of good Obama punches. He’s the first black president. He’s really polarizing. Heck, it would almost e hard to not hit a home run off of the comedy tee that is an episode about Obama. Well Brickleberry, like the great John F. Kennedy, does not do things because they are easy but because they are hard and manages to make a very not funny episode about Obama. To understand how they manage it, you have to understand what every character in Brickleberry is doing throughout the episode. I will take you through the plot of the episode. My apologies…
The A-Plot follows around the head ranger Woody as he prepares to get a visit from President Obama to receive a perfect attendance award. Unfortunately, Woody is stuck with the annoying Steve after Woody attempts to murder Steve and accidentally shoots himself Christmas Story-style. The tough part here isn’t their wacky misadventures; it’s the stuff in between. Every second they are talking about poop. Always. Many times it is for no reason. At one point, Woody just shits himself. You get it? He pooped. Haha. There is also a stretch in the middle where everything is going well, so it wouldn’t make sense to have anything like that happen but they get some poop in there anyway so Steve makes Woody pancakes and Woody remarks that they are so good. “It’s like a coconut angel took a shit in my mouth.” So yeah. There’s a lot of that going on with them.
The B-Plot is all about the other two rangers, Ethel and Connie, getting the park into shape until Connie tells Ethel that Obama is really into her and this whole trip is just a big charade to get them together. Ethel is skeptical considering that Connie looks and sounds like a barn, so the rest of their bit is mostly Connie reading weird messages from the President as proof. It’s awful. I was going to list some of the dialogue but you know how there was that video of Saddam Hussein getting hanged and your friends told you not to watch it but you did anyway and you felt really bad afterwards and kinda forever since? This is like that. I will say, their story almost gets funny at the end when the president shows up and makes a move, but I think that is mostly because the things he was doing would have been funny in any scenario. I am just a sucker for Obama impersonators.
The C-Plot is about a couple of trailer park characters named Bobby and Bodean. This bit was actually not that bad. Bobby tries to start his own O’Bobby-care system since he detests the President’s. Bodean, his only customer, is so accident prone that he shows Bobby why healthcare is so awful. Their timing was funny. The turns their journey took were surprising enough to be entertaining. There was some shock humor. It is Brickleberry after all. In this case, you didn’t really mind because the content outside of the shock humor was pretty strong. They also took advantage of something no other group seemed to do.
Bobby and Bodean was the only group that had anything to do with the episode’s central theme; the President is coming to Brickleberry. You would assume there was a lot you could do with that. Sure, the episode ended with Woody throwing up all over the President but until that point it might as well have just been a “two characters that don’t like each other are stuck together” episode. All of the horrible Connie moments would have worked just fine with any other person at the other end of the text messages. Why bother doing an Obama episode at all if you aren’t going to get into the things that are special about him? He is the first black president! He isn’t good that at basketball. He smoked weed in college. There are plenty of things to do besides having the characters that don’t usually get along spend more than the usual amount of time together. I don’t watch a lot of Brickleberry, but I have a feeling that has been done before. Oh and where was Denzel, the black park ranger? He was stealing all of Woody’s stuff which isn’t really offensive as much as it’s just a waste of the only black character.
The hardest park about not liking this show is that I really enjoy Daniel Tosh. I loved his stand up as a teenager and I still do now. It really holds up. I watch Tosh.0 regularly. I have to look away from the screen from time to time, but overall I think it is really funny. Even on this show I really liked him. He plays Malloy, the sarcastic bear cub who is mostly there to supply the occasional one-liner. You kinda feel like the show is built around him, which would work if he was in the show from more than a combined three minutes. This is especially true considering that this show is Daniel Tosh’s pet project at Comedy Central but that’s really where the big problem comes in.
Brickleberry just really doesn’t hold up on an incredibly strong Comedy Central lineup. They currently have The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, Nathan for You, Drunk History, Workaholics, Broad City, Kroll Show, Inside Amy Schumer and @Midnight. Those shows are really good. Heck I can even put Key and Peele on that list. It’s getting there. Every one of those shows is playing to an audience that loves it and will support it like crazy forever. Sure, the Tosh.0 audience will carry Brickleberry for a while but when Comedy Central needs to make room for the next big thing, I don’t think they’re going to get rid of South Park.
Rating: 3/10
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Matthew Nando Kelly is a contributing writer for Pop-Break. Aside from TV reviews, he also writes about films, music, and video games. Matthew also has a podcast called Mad Bracket Status where he discusses pop culture related brackets with fellow Pop-Break writer DJ Chapman. He loves U2, cats, and the New Orleans Saints. He can also occasionally be found writing lists on Topless Robot. His twitter is @NationofNando
