The Great North should be the flagship cartoon of Fox’s Sunday lineup

[TMC]

https://www.avclub.com/the-great-nor...oon-1851116160

With Family Guy moving to Wednesdays, this cozy sitcom deserves the top spot in the network's “Animation Domination” slate.

By Sam Barsanti
Published January 17, 2024

Fox officially had too many adult-animated sitcoms for its regular Sunday night “Animation Domination” lineup to handle. Relative newcomer Krapopolis and actual newcomer Grimsburg have joined The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, and The Great North on Sundays. And Family Guy is getting bumped to Wednesdays, a night it can call its own, far from The Simpsons’ big shadow. This all gives Bob’s Burgers a chance to recenter itself as the top-tier animated show on the network that evening, which is well-deserved. But there’s actually a show in that night’s lineup that deserves it more: The Great North.

The series, created by Regular Show writer Minty Lewis and Bob’s Burgers veterans Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin, has been quietly trucking along on Fox’s Sundays for three seasons now—a fourth kicked off on January 7—and (brace yourself for a hot take) has frequently been funnier and more endearing than its more high-profile sister shows.

With practice, Fox sports drama Pitch could have knocked it out of the park
The Great North has obvious Bob’s Burgers DNA, but one could argue that has more to do with the tradition of American sitcoms (wacky family in a specific place/situation) than anything else. It centers on the Tobin family in the remote town of Lone Moose, Alaska, led by Nick Offerman’s Beef Tobin—a fisherman who takes care of his four children while dealing with a deep well of trauma from his own tumultuous upbringing and the sudden departure of his terrible ex-wife Kathleen. (She abandoned the family before the events of the show.)

The Tobin family includes Jenny Slate’s Judy (a free-spirited and feminist teen girl who has imaginary conversations with Alanis Morissette), Paul Rust’s Ham (who is gay and just a little dopey), Will Forte’s Wolf (an adult who is definitely dopey), Aparna Nancherla’s Moon (a 10-year-old boy who is very confident in his survival skills and always wears a bear costume), and Dulcé Solan’s Honeybee (Wolf’s wife who moved to Lone Moose from Fresno).

It’s a standard wacky sitcom family, albeit one that is lovingly fleshed out and feels like a proper ensemble, but one of the smartest choices in The Great North is that Beef doesn’t lovingly tolerate his family (like Bob) or actively harm them (like Homer). He just supports them all unconditionally, even though he’s a competent outdoorsman and they’re all generally artsy weirdos.

This helps make The Great North feel wonderfully cozy, which suits its chilly Alaska setting. It also quietly makes the whole thing just a bit profound, especially in comparison to some of its contemporaries, since every member of the Tobin family—to a varying degree—was traumatized by the behavior of the kids’ mother. The show can get away with some dark jokes about sad things that happened to the family, but it’s okay because they’re all clearly fine, have dealt with it, and have come together stronger and more deeply bonded.

And, of course, it is also very funny and often wildly creative. There’s an episode where the family gets trapped inside during a snowstorm and immediately has to resort to an emergency set of cabin fever plans to stay separated and not drive each other crazy, which eventually leads to a ridiculous courtroom sequence after someone breaks Beef’s prized Enough Said DVD in half. Another episode involves the town running an emergency drill based around a hypothetical dinosaur attack. It’s sort of a Parks & Recreation-style heightened universe, but the only thing grounding it in reality is the lower 48 states that you rarely see or hear about.

The Great North is a perfect show to relax to, much more than The Simpsons (which tends to be kind of in-your-face and plot-y these days) or Bob’s Burgers (which can turn aggravating when the kids act too much like kids, or when they do too many episodes about … whichever of the kids is your personal least favorite). It’s not that the Bob’s Burgers or Simpsons approach is bad, it’s just not new anymore.

We’ve seen them before because both of those shows have been on for a long time (Bob’s Burger’s premiered more than a decade ago, and The Simpsons is old enough to have given birth to Bob’s Burgers). The Great North is new and fresh and hilarious and lovely, Fox should be holding it up as the flagship show of the Sunday night block to encourage people who may be sick of the Animation Domination vibe to give it a chance. Then, when everyone’s used to it in 10 years and The Simpsons is approaching season 50, some new show can come along and revitalize the whole Sunday lineup all over again.

[James28]

Great, the perfect article to open up a can of worms and have people thinking The Simpsons needs to be gone from new episodes for good. That would be the only way for The Great North to realistically be FOX's flagship animated series, because it's obvious that The Simpsons is selfishly holding back the younger animated shows on FOX simply by continuing to air first-run. Only way for both The Simpsons and The Great North to co-exist in the long-term is for FOX Network to launch a second animation night (and that could start with the move of Family Guy to Wednesdays).

[king of comedy]

The Great North is still fresh and is aging well. The Simpsons has aged terribly. Time for The Simpsons to pass the torch and bow out gracefully.