It's hard to deny Carsey-Werner's effect on the sitcom industry. What started out as a simple production company had grown to the high heavens, bringing us popular sitcoms like The Cosby Show, A Different World, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Roseanne before it got ruined, and a slew of short-lived shows. While sticking with sitcoms, Carsey-Werner had always tried to experiment with different frameworks. They stuck with what they felt comfortable with, but they tried to expand a bit, giving up after try two. We've got a 2D cartoon and a 3D one, and since it's only two, let's get both on the chopping block.
God, The Devil, and Bob
I've brought this show up every time I brought up something related to NBC's animated shows. I already talked about Stressed Eric, I already talked about Father of the Pride, I actually talked about how elusive Sammy was, might as well kill two birds with one stone and round out NBC's prime time animated sitcoms.
If you watched Adult Swim in 2011 or if you're subscribed to Mr. Enter, you probably know about this show. God, The Devil, and Bob debuted in the summer of 2000 on NBC. I might've mentioned it before, but for reaffirmation, this got cancelled after four episodes, and not just because of bad ratings. Obviously religious protest had a hand in this too, more on that later.
The show was created by Matthew Carlson, who had done a fair bit, doing work for Malcolm in the Middle, The Wonder Years, Sons of Tuscon, created Camp Wilder and Men Behaving Badly and for better or worse, wrote the screenplay for Wagons East. With his vanity card, along with NBC's production house and Carsey-Werner, that rounds things out on a production basis.
The Sting
On the surface, we see personifications of God and the Devil, wagering the fate of the world and leaving it in the hands of a slow-witted but well-meaning man. Haven't heard that one before, that's real original, no seriously- I'm actually being serious, this is the first I heard of a plot like that.
What I get from this show is that our lead, Bob Allman, represents all of man, pun intended. Bob isn't perfect, none of us are, we all do the wrong thing but it doesn't define us as a whole. We don't want to be perfect, because perfection is as meaningless as a cliched sitcom dad, and Bob manages to climb out of that hole with some unintentional charm and strokes of genius
Of course we need to have the smarter by default wife to round things out, Donna. I will say this, while she just barely breaks dimensions, this is the first I've seen of a sitcom character going back to college, and I'm glad they didn't just make the show center on that. The kids are more interesting from a philosophical basis. We have Megan, the rebellious bitch who represents the extent of middle of the road evil and corruption, but deep down had just lost her way. Then we have Andy, a reflection of childhood innocence, and the luxury of being a damn good child character, smarter than we give him credit for and getting some of Bob's wit.
I first caught this show on Adult Swim, and given their scope of shows I imagined this would've been some Family Guy level shit, but then I learned it was picked up from NBC and I got thrown a bigger curve ball than the one I got from Freaks (the new one.) Rather than going for exaggerated takes for God and the Devil, they're actually played respectfully. God is a kind soul who would occasionally give in to his anger and the Devil maintains his evilness though temptation, some saying he's more bible accurate [citation needed].
Religious figures condemned this show, likely because they featured personifications of God and the Devil, often portraying the former as flawed and the latter as sympathetic, but let's be real, of all the religious shows out there, this has to be the least offensive out there, and hell, it inspires hope. It shows that even if we take the wrong path in life, we're not damned for doing so. We all fall, it doesn't make us bad, it makes us human.
And with that in mind, I'm glad Mr. Enter liked this show because then, he'd have to address the elephant in the room. The show's animation and overall style. By instinct, I imagine shows are produced like a year or few months in advance before getting sent to networks. But with this show, it either looks as though they made new episodes weekly and did the animation last, or they bothered to do it all themselves. No animation studio is listed at the end, aside from one called CW Animation, and by the initials, that's code for the animation was produced in-house, with the only outsourcing occurring for coloring the animatics.
The characters have a rough look, though it seems to only apply to the humans. Another nuance I picked up on is that while the backgrounds are drawn, in the Allman house and some outside areas, it looks as though they animated over live-action pictures. If you look close enough at most scenes set in the house you can notice a few, I found a live-action carpet and wall clock, as well as a picture of Andy, where he's pasted onto a picture of a car.
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That isn't to say the animation is terrible, more ambitious shots are pulled with ease. So the case for this, odd design, but good animation.
As far as acting goes, French Stewart voices Bob and does it well, James Gardner had enjoyed voicing God and Alan Cumming pulled the Devil off nicely. Nancy Cartwright and Kath Soucie appeared in this as well... just thought you should know that.
While this didn't get the attention Carsey-Werner wanted, I think they should be happy to know this got a bit of a critical re-evaulation over the years.
Game Over
Game Over was created by David Sacks, another someone who got by with a lot of shows. He wrote and produced for The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle (seems the best staff come from Malcolm in the Middle) and The Tick, unfortunately he was also involved with Regular Show at some point... presumably at gunpoint. And just to make up for that, he also executive produced Pig Goat Banana Cricket.
Producer wise, the show was produced by David Goestch, Jason and Ross Venokur. Goestch had involvement with Carsey-Werner in the past, doing work for 3rd Rock from the Sun and had recently worked on The Big Bang Theory. Jason Venokur had also worked on 3rd Rock so it's easy to see how they got involved, plus Jason also produced another Carsey-Werner show, Grounded for Life. Ross had wrote for the live action The Tick and hadn't done much noteworthy since 2005. Now, this accounts for their vanity card, and I assume the only other one belongs to Sacks.
Unlike God, The Devil and Bob where the studio who produced the animation isn't credited by logo, it is here. DKP Studios. For a quick background, DKP had produced the animation for Veggie Tales, later getting bought out by IDT Entertainment before becoming known as Jam Filled Entertainment. Plus they're Canadian, and for some irony, their work held up better than Mainframe Entertainment's.
Perhaps due to a lack of faith, this show turned up on UPN... two years before the network went belly up. I mean, I don't want to knock the network, they let creators get away with a lot more than the big three, but The WB was technically better than it. This lasted for five out of six episodes and didn't do so well critically. Shocker.
The Sting
Stop me if you've heard this one before. What is life like inside of a video game? If you said sitcom, can you land me a spot on Netflix? I wanna see how much my show ideas suck.
It's a sitcom centered on video game characters, post-gameplay. A race car driver tough guy who happens to be voiced by Patrick Warburton, a cleavage bearing wife with a Lara Croft-edge (and she's played by Lucy Liu), the rebellious daughter who's ironically more interesting than others like her by default when compared to lesser sitcoms (she plays volleyball in a hoodie and has a militant activist edge) and a son who walked off the music video for Pretty Fly (for a white guy), who happens to be voiced by E.G. Daily. They also have a talking animal, but you don't need to know about it.
In spite of being a video game-centered sitcom, going by the first episode the references to video games are far and in-between. The best you get are verbal references that have a 50/50 chance of fitting with an occurring joke, the worst was Crash Bandicoot just appearing on a Got Milk? billboard. If this was set in Georgia and that was a peach billboard it may've been more clever. They do attempt to do some visual video game ads, but these are marginalized to some quick jokes, as if the sitcom schtick is so sacred that straying from its genesis is the equivalent of fucking a pig. Since this is a sitcom with no overarching story, it just takes one episode, and since there're so few it's likely they haven't got their stride.
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Now, this is just going by first impressions. To sum up, the rebellious daughter is the most interesting character to me. The Patrick Warburton character is synonymous with Patrick Warburton, the guy is the epitome of typecasting, though I still like his work. Lucy Liu is easily the worst offender to me, I'd like to say her participation on the Charlie's Angels video game was false advertising, but maybe she really isn't that good of an actress. As for E.G. Daily, a key reason why I hate American voice actors is because they always put the same level of quality for everything they do, nothing's exciting with them anymore.
As for the animation... it's actually the highlight to it, for the most part. It has a good style, it looks and moves better than the average Splash/Moonscope/Mike Young CG cartoon, but okay, the faces, don't look directly into most of them on the closeups.
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Personally, I'd take this over DreamWork's animation, well, show wise. Speaking of which, I brought Game Over up when I reviewed Father of the Pride. Since both came out in 2004 and are both CG shows, which of these do I pref- this one.
Overall, both this and Father of the Pride are one in the game, generic sitcoms that only had the luxury of being CG animated. Both had ideas with potential that got squandered almost instantly, but for this... it had just a little more potential. This could've been the video game cartoon to end all video game cartoons, a commentary on gaming in general with sitcom aspects toned down or tweaked to fit the setting. But then it hit me, the produces and writers behind this probably had no gaming experience beyond- fuck it I doubt they even played a Tiger Handheld game, just read up about it and got input from gamers.
There're many directions this show could've gone, and as is I have a better time sitting through this than Father of the Pride, but it just took the safe route. Maybe they could've focused on the girl? People like her are marginalized to recurring protagonists and she could've broken a negative stigma if she had good writing to back her up. Maybe try Captain N's formula and fix it. Maybe do what they did here and work on making the jokes less juvenile, we wouldn't have that humor if we were conditioned to think it was okay. I don't complain about it, but I know it's wrong.
Final Thoughts
God, The Devil and Bob is the best of the two, easily. It had a unique premise and an equally unique execution. If you could find the show I recommend it. As for Game Over, though I've been negative and many of my points hold water... I've seen worse, I've seen Father of the Pride which is even more generic, heck, I've seen Penguins of Madagascar (and yes I hate that show too.) But I find it hard to recommend it to anyone. For gamers the references are surface level and for general audiences, you've seen these characters before, maybe not all at once, but you have. Patrick Warburton, the mom from Robotboy, Hayley Smith, Lil Romeo, Brian Griffin. But I'm bound to find worse.
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