TV Review: Disenchantment Part 2 (2019). The animated fantasy adventure continues to drag it's heels.

Image courtesy of Netflix

Tv Review: Disenchantment (2018) by Ben Jeffries (22/9/2019)

Season 1b Episodes 11-20 (20/9/2019)

10 Episodes, 22-27 minutes

Fantasy, Comedy, Animation

Streaming on Netflix

Disenchantment Part 2 continues it's trend of being frustratingly noncommittal.

Disenchantment is an animated satirical fantasy sit-com developed by Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Futurama) and Josh Weinstein (Futurama, Sit Down Shut Up). It follows the adventures of delinquent Princess Bean (Abbi Jacobson) and her two friends Elfo the elf (Nat Faxon), and her personal Demon, Luci (Eric Andre), as they take every opportunity they can to drink, gamble, party, and otherwise avoid the responsibilities of life. The first ten episodes hit Netflix in August of 2018 to a lukewarm reception (currently showing a 62% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes), with critics labeling it amusing but overly safe. I was a bit kinder to it (read my review here), taking the momentum it found in it’s later episodes as a signal of better things to come. Unfortunately, the second batch of ten episodes that launched Friday (September 20, 2019), making up the rest of Season 1, falls short of even that humble high water mark.

The show still looks wonderful: It’s colourful and interesting, with the same attention to background detail that’s characteristic of Groening’s other cartoons. The performances are all as good as they have been, with Abbi Jacobson really settling into the role of Bean and bringing out the characters inner life. Everyone is on board with their characters and eager to play. Where Disenchantment falls short is with the unpolished state of it's writing.

With it’s high concept setting and anti-hero central cast, to say nothing of the shared production staff, Disenchantment is clearly made in a mold similar to Groenings previous show, Futurama. An animated scifi comedy, Futurama was at it’s best when interrogating it’s own genre trappings and challenging it’s characters, but Disenchantment doesn’t have the focus or precision to pull that off, and is still too busy trying to nail down what it wants to be to even try. The writing seems to lack enthusiasm for any of the numerous story threads that have been set up, and the show feels trapped in the shadow of an overarching plot and mythology that, for unknown reasons, it’s only allowed to investigate in the first and final episodes of a run.

As Bean, Elfo, and Luci stumble and bumble their way around Dreamland during this block of ten episodes we see a series of hidden-in-plain-sight clues which reference that mythology scattered about the kingdom. Symbols from Bean’s mothers’ homeland are scribed into the walls of the castle where Bean lives. An old pirate captain gives up his ship in order to chase a mystery when he sees another symbol carved in a similar manner. Dreamland’s Chamberlain, Odval (Maurice LaMarche), and the Arch Druidess (Tress MacNeil), appear to be plotting in secret with other members of a secret society. There’s obviously a back story and mythology at work behind the scenes, motivating the actions of the cast, but the writing seems unwilling to engage with that story. The show we do get to see is too busy making lazy puns or tired jokes about female promiscuity to be bothered exploring that mythology or explaining it to the audience.

Things can get a little wild in Elf Alley
Image courtesy of Netflix 

Which leaves Disenchantment spinning it’s wheels with pointless side quests and inconsequential plot lines that do little to expand the world or develop the central characters. Elfo’s people leave their magical home of Elfwood to help un-petrify the people of Dreamland, who were magically turned to stone earlier in the season. The elves establish their own neighbourhood in the city, called Elf Alley, but it’s never really explained why they don’t just go home again after helping the people of Dreamland, choosing instead to live in a ghetto of their own making. From a story perspective it puts Elves and Dreamlanders in close proximity, which makes it easier to plot out stories that involve both groups, but it never feels like a choice that was made by the characters. You can feel the writers shuffling characters and story elements around to try and find a configuration that makes for a smoother blend of comedy and story, but they never find one that works.

Once our three heroes return to Dreamland, Elfo himself is an inconsequential presence during these episodes. Resurrected by Bean and Luci following his death in the previous batch of episodes, Elfo spends much of the season in the background, serving as little more than comic relief, a supporting character with nothing important to do. Luci is in the same position: after helping his two friends escape Hell in the early episodes he’s left kicking around in the background of scenes making jokes about how annoying Elfo is, occasionally showing up at the conclusion of an episode to solve Bean’s problems.

With so little for him to do in the script
Luci is forced to find his own fun.
Image courtesy of Netflix

Disenchantment seems unable to reconcile the competing desires of wanting to be a serialised adventure on one hand and an episodic fantasy sit-com on the other, and as a result is unable to deliver a good version of either. The adventure is constantly derailed by diversions for under written jokes, and the comedy is routinely stifled by the emotional toll the adventure takes on Bean and her friends. In a better version of Disenchantment those two elements would be interwoven, feeding off of each other, but here there’s very few points where the two competing tones intersect and the unwillingness to fully engage with either leaves the show feeling nebulous and flat. The writers attempt to keep things fresh by introducing new characters and new plots, but they only further muddy the already murky waters of the show.

New characters are introduced and set up as important players in the ongoing story, only to disappear after a single episode, never to be seen again. More than once the show establishes goals for it’s protagonists and then instantly puts them aside as it gets sidetracked by a cute B story like Luci dating Elfo’s ex-girlfriend or Bean writing a play.

There are a few legitimate laughs to be had along the way, and the adventure takes Bean and her friends to some interesting new places. Bean visits Steamland, a steampunk nation ruled by science rather than magic, where the streets are lit by electric lamps and people travel by airship. There’s a brief excursion to the land of the Ogre’s to gather some special fruit with healing properties and, of course, there’s the visit to Hell itself early in the run, where Bean and Luci meet Elfo’s disembodied soul before rescuing him in a daring escape. Every new location is presented with the same exciting visual design and attention to detail as Dreamland was in the early episodes. There’s plenty of visual gags and funny signs littered throughout the background for audiences to enjoy, though it can be frustrating when the same level of care hasn’t been paid to crafting the plots and jokes at the centre of an episode.

Late in the season Elfo and Luci become roommates in an Elf Alley apartment. Predictably, tensions grow as the two start to get on each others nerves until, early one morning, Luci is woken by a loud honking noise. The demon emerges from his room to find Elfo hosting a a trio of ducks to a table covered in pancakes. It’s Elfo’s misguided attempt to pay Luci back for not being invited to the demon’s party earlier in the episode. You can feel the beginnings of a major gag being set up as Elfo passes food to his feathered guests while dismissing Luci with a sarcastic “Byeeee!”. It’s an absurd scene, with the birds honking and squabbling over the pile of pancakes as Elfo and Luci argue. As things escalate to a physical fight, with the elf and the demon rolling about in the pancakes on the table while being pecked by ducks, you’re eagerly waiting for the kicker, that perfectly judged moment that ties the whole scene together and puts the gag over the top, but it never comes. The scene cuts unceremoniously away to another story line, and neither the conflict, the ducks, or the apartment is ever mentioned again for the rest of the season. The whole sub-plot feels extraneous and un-neccessary, like a dangling thread the writers worked on up to a certain point before cutting it off short when they couldn’t find a way to weave it into the broader tapestry of the show, and it happens over and over again throughout these ten episodes. Plenty of comedies play with tangential stories that don’t add to their core narratives, and it wouldn’t be so frustrating here if it was at least truly funny, but it feels incomplete and it’s only mildly amusing at best.

Unfortunately, that’s about the nicest thing you can say about these ten episodes of Disenchantment: they’re mildly amusing. Even with the pretty visuals and committed performances from the cast, the writing isn’t polished enough and the directing lacks the precision to land this particular variety of animated adventure comedy. On the back of the original ten episodes Netflix ordered seasons through to the year 2021 so, barring a sudden cancellation, there’s still time for the show to figure out the recipe and nail down the right mix of it’s strong ingredients to deliver the quality storytelling that, so far, we’ve only seen glimpses of.

5.5/10

Disenchantment Stars: Abbi Jacobson, Nat Faxon, Eric Andre, John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeill, Billy West

Created by: Matt Groening

Written by: Jamie Angell, Shion Takeuchi, Jeff Rowe, Jeny Batten, David X. Cohen, M. Dickson, Eric Horsted, Patric M. Verrone, Adam Briggs, Andrew Burrell, Ben Ward

Directed by: Ira Sherak, Wesley Archer, David D. Au, Albert Calleros, Frank Marino, Peter Avanzino, Dwayne Carey-Hill, Edmund Fong

a Production from: The Curiosity Company, The ULULU Company, Rough Draft Studios, Netflix

Distributed by: Netflix