Disenchantment: Season 2.0 (Part 3)

Bean and her companions are "guests" of Queen Dagmer, whilst a low-key coup has seen Dreamland's increasingly deranged King Zøg deposed in favour of his son and the conniving Prime Minister and Archdruidess. Whilst Bean tries to free herself and help her father, she also becomes aware of a new threat to the kingdom arising from Steamland.

It's been a bumpy road for Disenchantment, the third animated series from Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama. The first part* was all over the place, but settled down towards the end of its run, which was followed by a stronger and more promising second part. The third part, it was hoped, would build on this success further.

Alas, those hopes were in vain. Quality control in the third part of Disenchantment has plummeted off a cliff, resulting in a weak and ill-conceived run of episodes which might have at least started tapping the nail into the show's coffin.

The faults with this part are almost too numerous to list, but the biggest sin is the sidelining of King Zøg by making him go mad. John DiMaggio is probably the vocal highlight of the show's very talented cast, as he was on Futurama (where he voiced the robot Bender) so reducing his role on the series to honking like a goose and removing almost all of his comedic ability is a really weird move. The show occasionally veers towards using the character arc (if that's not being too generous) to say something about mental health, but never really does, more often using Zøg's decline as a source of cheap laughs. Only at the very end of the part, when he finds a way of communicating with Bean briefly, does DiMaggio get to stretch his acting chops for a moving but all-too-quickly-abandoned storyline.

The rest of the part suffers from awful pacing, never knowing when to let a misfiring joke or character move on, a clear difference from Groening's earlier shows which were much more disciplined and quickfire in their comedy. This extends to the individual episodes, which I think now should 100% have been hard-capped at the 22 minutes traditional to most US animated series. At 30+ minutes, almost every single episode is flabby and overlong. There's also a growing reliance on stock comic characters and running gags, which for a show in its sixth or seventh season is a bad sign, but in just its second/third* is much more concerning.

The voice actors do their best, but the material is very thin gruel indeed. Luci is sidetracked and has nothing to do for most of the part (a storyline where he is supplanted by a talking cat has some potential but is wasted); Elfo is given some additional development which sees him moving on from his crush on Bean, only to have it resurrected when it was beyond tiresome in the first episode of the series. Other characters suffer from unclear motivations: what is Odval about, does he want to betray Zøg and rule the kingdom or not? Any given episode gives dramatically varying answers to this question.

There are a few exceptions to the downward spiral of the season. Matt Berry's vocal gesticulations can elevate even the most awful material and he heroically saves a Merkimer-centric episode almost single-handedly. Richard Ayoade also helps elevate a new character in the Steamland episodes, but he's not as adept at handling the really ripe lines.

The best episode is a quieter one where Bean falls in love with a mermaid (becoming the first canonically bisexual major character in a Groening show in the process) and there's time for some character reflection, something the show can do quite well when it's not trying to hammer through some awkward laughs based on outdated tropes.

Overall though, the third part of Disenchantment (**½) is a major disappointment, throwing away the progress made to date for a season that's very rarely funny and rarely raises its game above the boring. The shoots of green are very, very widely spaced-apart here. The season is available worldwide on Netflix now.

* Slightly tiresomely, Netflix is commissioning this series in 20-episode seasons which are then released as 10-episode half-seasons, known as "parts". So "Part 3" is in fact the first half of Season 2. Don't moan at me about this, moan at Netflix.

Disenchantment: Season 1.5 (Part 2)

Dreamland is in a perilous state, with the population turned to stone by the machinations of the returned Queen Dagmer. Bean, oblivious to her mother's true nature, has travelled with her to Maru where she meets the rest of her family but also learns some of the truth of what is going on. It is up to Bean to rescue her friends, save Dreamland and defeat her evil mother.

The first season of Disenchantment was a bit of a disappointment: Matt Groening bringing his trademark art style to bear on fantasy but failing to equal his earlier works (The Simpsons and Futurama) in the laughter stakes. Towards the end of Season 1, Groening and his writing team hit upon a different formula, one of mixing tragedy, comedy and pathos to achieve a better result. Fortunately, this upswing in quality continues through the second part of the first season (why this couldn't just be Season 2, I don't know).

This second batch of ten episodes initially focuses on resolving the Season 1.0 cliffhanger, with Bean learning the true nature of her family very quickly and escaping back home, where she has to undo the damage wrought by her mother. This includes a trip into Hell to rescue Elfo and an alliance with the elves to save the townspeople, in return for the elves being allowed to live in Dreamland's capital (or, more accurately, in a newly-established ghetto in the capital). All of this gives this batch of episodes more focus and narrative energy than the opening half of the season.

By taking a more serious tack - this batch of episodes riffs off issues like colonisation, interracial families, mid-life crises and racism - Disenchantment oddly finds its own niche. This also helps the show, perhaps counter-intuitively, become funnier. Whilst it was rare for the first half of the season to do more than elicit the odd wry smile, the second half did trigger a fair few full laughs. I believe I even guffawed once.

The writing and characterisation is better in this second batch of episodes, although still not as good as it could be. Disenchantment's animated fantasy label-mate at Netflix, The Dragon Prince, is sharper, more dramatic and funnier (despite not being as overtly a comedy) and Disenchantment is never in any danger of matching it.

Season 1, Part 2 (seriously Netflix, sort it out) of Disenchantment (***½) is an improvement over the first season and is certainly on the right course to becoming a much better show, but for the moment it remains at best a diversion in a landscape filled with much stronger shows. Hopefully the improvement will continue through future seasons. The season is available to watch on Netflix now.

Disenchantment: Season 1 (Part 1)

Bean is a princess, the daughter of King Zøg of Dreamland. However, she is more interested in drinking and partying than diplomacy and lessons. Her fortunes change when meets Elfo, an elf from the forest whose blood may hold the key to a secret mission of her father's, and Luci, a demon from hell who inexplicably decides to attach himself to her destiny. The three get into various adventures as Bean tries (and mostly fails) to grow as a person.

Disenchantment is the third major animated comedy series from American writer-artist Matt Groening, following on from The Simpsons (1989-present) and Futurama (1999-2013). It marks his first work for Netflix and his first TV work away from Fox.

As a result of this, the show arrived with a great deal of expectation: could Groening do for fantasy what The Simpsons had done for suburbia and Futurama for science fiction? (i.e. have several excellent seasons and then slowly grind out numerous seasons of increasingly declining tedium) The answer is maybe. It's easy to forget that The Simpsons took a good one to two seasons to get really good and Futurama was wildly inconsistent for its early run, and Disenchantment definitely follows the same pattern.

Disenchantment's biggest problem is that it isn't very funny. Groening's earlier shows used their genres to poke fun at tropes and cliches and everyday facets of life, but Disenchantment doesn't do that as successfully. The occasional gag does land but there are many more misfires: Elfo's unrequited love for Bean is drained of every hint of possible pathos and emotion and becomes seriously annoying very quickly. Rewatching Futurama, it's interesting that Fry's love for Leela does not become a major plot point until several seasons into the show, and after Leela has already shown some affection back to him (just doubting that he'd make a reliable long-term partner), so that storyline was better-handled.

The worldbuilding is also a bit sketchy: Disenchantment takes place in a pretty standard fantasy world with knights and wizards and various monsters. There are some original flourishes, like the race of intelligent amphibians from Dankmire who are allied to Dreamland through marriage, but these are mostly left underdeveloped.

For a full six episodes, the show flounders on, trying to mine some humour from the apparently revelatory fact Bean is a girl who likes getting drunk (gasp!) and Elfo fancies Bean, which is funny because he's a little green guy! The eyes start glazing over, but occasional strong moments do break through, such as Zøg (a great vocal performance by Groening regular John DiMaggio, Bender himself) turning out to be less of a blustering oaf than he first appears - even occasionally risking pathos - and a scene-stealing turn by the immortally brilliant Matt Berry and his fine-tuned vocal gesticulations as a talking pig.

Just as Disenchantment reaches the point where you may feel like abandoning it, the show does unexpectedly level up. The last three episodes of the series form a continuous epic story full of family betrayal, some decent plot twists and a few good laughs, helped by Matt Berry's return as a semi-regular (which continues into Season 2). It doesn't completely undo the damage done by the less-compelling opening episodes, but it does at least become more watchable.

Disenchantment (***) still isn't a very funny comedy, but it turns out it can be a half-effective, lighthearted character drama when it puts its mind to it. The question is if viewers can put up with the weak opening set of episodes and the lack of laughs to make it to the point where the show does start getting better. It is available worldwide on Netflix now.