Mary Shelley's Frankenhole - Season 1

Nine of the ten episodes produced for this season has aired, and the tenth, about Mother Teresa, is nowhere on the schedule. So I'll go ahead and talk about this. It's the new show from the creator of Moral Orel, and is both weird and subversive in similar ways, although I think it's also more immediately humorous. It likes playing around with classic horror and time travel story tropes, and also being as offensive as possible with its frequent fake celebrity appearances. Everyone's a target, from Jesus to LBJ to Ron Howard. I almost felt like they were trying too hard with the pop culture stuff, but kept with it because the central premise is pretty interesting.

It begins with the classic (movie) Frankenstein story, and then deviates from it pretty wildly. Victor has taken an immortality potion and given it to his assistant Polidori (the show's best character) and his wife Elizabeth. So now they're living forever, and he has created a system of "Frankenholes" that allow important people from everywhere in history to visit him for help with problems no one else can fix. Plenty of other classic characters have parts, although they're a bit different. Igor is voiced by the creator's daughter, the monster himself is very insecure, and Dracula and Death are thorns in his side. It's a very cynical show, but there's so much creativity in the setting and the problems the celebrities come to him with are so bizarre that it can't help being a lot of fun. As always it's questionable whether it gets to continue, but I hope they go on to explore the concept a lot more in future seasons.

The Drinky Crow Show

The Drinky Crow Show is another reasonably funny, unfit-for-children cartoon on Adult Swim, based on Tony Millionaire's long-running comic strip named Maakies. Millionaire and Eric Kaplan, who's written for a number of humorous shows, seem to have just transplanted the characters pretty seamlessly into animated form. It's surprisingly good looking, with computer generated images made to look hand drawn, but with simple, recycled designs to keep it economical. It's all pretty surreal and hyper-violent, but in an endearing way. Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby, voiced by Stamatopoulos and Herman, spend all their time getting drunk, pursuing women (although in very different ways), and sailing around getting into trouble. A lot of the dialogue and delivery is the intentionally stilted sort of stuff that you might remember from older cartoons, and along with the period nautical theme it gives the show an odd atmosphere. There are some good guests too, like a couple appearances by Bret and Jemaine as aliens with designs for Earth. Not every episode is a big success, but it's definitely a funnier and more watchable show that I expected based on the early promos.

Moral Orel

Adult Swim just finished "44 Nights of Orel" showing the entire series over the course of eleven weeks in a special order to compliment the new episodes of the third and final season. I'm still not fully clear on whether it was canceled because it was so depressing or it was so depressing because it was canceled, but based on the last episode I think it's the latter. When the show first aired a couple years ago, it was a unique but somewhat simplistic parody of old sitcoms and religion. Every episode featured Orel, an innocent and painfully devout Christian boy, grossly misinterpreting some sort of lesson from his father or pastor and doing something horrible like selling his urine or raising the dead. Afterward his dad lectured him on how he was wrong with the help of his belt and then reminded Orel of one of God's "missing commandments". It was often clever and funny enough, but pretty disposable too.

I didn't watch as much after that, but as I learned in the last couple months, they started going in a much different direction with the show starting in season two, and taking it even further with the last one. The focus is less on being funny and more on just developing the characters in the strange town of Moralton. There's still some darkly humorous stuff happening, but starting with the hunting trip that ends the second season, it can get downright disturbing. Orel's less pervasive of a protagonist, and it starts to be about his dad's dirty little secrets more than him. Just because it's not that funny doesn't mean it's without merit though, as some moments in the last season are as meaningful as any I've seen on Adult Swim. And it's not all bad though, with the final episode doing a nice job of showing that there's still hope in the world. It's probably not for everyone but I liked it.