Dan Harmon‘s brand of comedy — sometimes puerile, sometimes erudite, usually with both sensibilities engaged in a graphic on-screen wrestling match — isn’t for everybody.
Even the shows of his that I love the most — Community and Rick and Morty and The Sarah Silverman Program, the usual stuff — lose me here and there.
Krapopolis
One thing I’ve never accused a Dan Harmon show of being was bland.
Krapopolis, a long-gestating Fox animated comedy notable for off-screen trivia — it’s already been renewed through a third season, plus it has some connection I don’t understand to the blockchain — is bland. Through the three episodes sent to critics, it looks bland and the stories it’s telling are bland and, most oddly of all, the thematic underpinnings of the series are bland.
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Krapopolis is never boring and I chuckled here and there. But I’m guessing most of my laughs came from the show’s exceptional vocal cast and not from any of the ideas or dialogue or references contained within. Thinking back on the show generates no hostility or pain, just general forgetfulness.
Our ostensible hero is Tyrannis (Richard Ayoade), king of Krapopolis. In a mythical version of ancient Greece populated by barbarian hordes, packs of rabid wolves and vengeful gods, Krapopolis is a beacon of civilization. Or at least Tyrannis wants it to be a beacon of civilization, which is confusing because nobody knows what civilization is. For the moment, Tyrannis is narcissistic and a bit spineless, prone to using his powers of diplomacy to make the rest of the world be like him — much to the chagrin of his overgrown warrior half-sister Stupendous (Pam Murphy) and undergrown scientist half-brother Hippocampus (Duncan Trussell).
Enter Tyrannis’ insecure goddess mother Deliria (Hannah Waddingham), who just wants to be worshipped, and his half-centaur, half-manticore father Shlub (Matt Berry), who just wants to have sex with anybody and everything.
Various episodic plots find Tyrannis negotiating with a rival king named Asskill (Keith David) — the percentage of things and jokes in this show referencing butt-stuff is close to 25 — Tyrannis falling in love with a nymph after killing a kraken, and Tyrannis inventing a modern Olympiad that isn’t violent enough for his citizens.
I had to look these plots up less than a week after watching them.
The weird thing is that Krapopolis is almost aware that it’s underwhelming — and when I say “almost” that may be an understatement, because if any modern showrunner were to create a series that was intentionally bland as a sociological experiment, it’s Dan Harmon. The first episode includes a bit about how a joke at a roast of sorts was “not laugh-out-loud funny” and it isn’t! The third episode begins with a reference to the eponymous city and a character insisting, “I swear it’s not as bad as the name sounds” and it kinda of is!
Harmon has been interested in jumbled versions of history and civilization through much of his work. It’s the primary plot of nearly every episode of Rick and Morty and part of the plot of a dozen Community episodes.
In this series, though, the humor is mostly in the vein of flat dramatic irony, using the past to make completely superficial observations about the present. This is a chance to see the birth of sports announcers, the first domestication of canines, the various ways that vases were the tabloids of their time and, through one of Hippocampus’ investigations, the origins of criminal forensics. Civilization is represented by, among other things: refusing to move, filling houses with sticks and … yeah, I’m not sure what else.
With that “using the past to comment on the present” structure, Krapopolis isn’t doing anything more innovative than what The Flintstones did many decades ago and what Disenchantment did fairly recently on Netflix. But it’s striking, or maybe strikingly not-striking, how sparse the visual and verbal landscapes are. This isn’t a show that would reward frequent pausing to catch background jokes, nor will you have to rewind because in chuckling at one joke you missed the next. More frequently, I was perfectly happy to miss limp jokes like Poseidon’s nephew being named Bro-seidon.
Animated shows and comedies often require the most time to find their voice and their style, and I’m not wholly intolerant of Krapopolis requiring a similar grace period. But does Krapopolis really establish much of anything in these first few episodes? Not really. Tyrannis is a whiny and wimpy leading man, so that puts him at odds with Stupendous. He doesn’t like how his mother inserts herself into every situation, so that puts him at odds with her. Shlub is horny all the time, so that puts Tyrannis … nothing in particular with him. And Hippocampus, with his head in a fishbowl and limbs that can’t support his body, would be a creepy creation if he weren’t so cute.
Hippocampus and Shlub, with his anatomy cobbled from his diverse assortment of biological ancestors, are the only characters whose basic design I found interesting and, thanks to Berry and Trussell, they’re the only characters I found consistently funny. Shlub may feel like a variation on basically half the characters Berry has played — including, most obviously and recently, Laszlo from What We Do in the Shadows — but Harmon and company have a good sense of what a Matt Berry character is supposed to sound like, and it’s a blessing to have Berry present to say things like, “Son, as monsters, we have to be careful about our messaging. Bad monsters kill people. Good monsters have sex with people. Trust me, that’s where the action is.” The extremely performative Deliria, who can transform into a variety of animals but mostly an ostrich, gives Waddingham lots to do, but if the press notes sent by Fox didn’t say that her character was “goddess of self-destruction and questionable choices,” I would not have known.
There are some decent early vocal cameos starting with David and including the likes of Yvette Nicole Brown, Dave Franco and Daveed Diggs. They’re all fine. None of them immediately make Krapopolis worth watching. For now, the show captures a world you can imagine Rick and Morty visiting at the start of an episode, but not a world in which you can imagine them wanting to spend much time.
