Watching the premiere of Fox’s Duncanville, it can be easy to forget that series co-creator Amy Poehler voices both both Duncan and his mother. It’s a testament to Poehler’s abilities to play children, clearly honed when she was playing the hyperactive Kaitlyn on Saturday Night Live. Now Poehler’s joined creative forces with The Simpsons alums Julie Thacker Scully and Mike Scully for the newest neighbor to show up on Fox’s animation block.
In the pilot, titled “Pilot,” however, Duncan is a lot less fun compared to Kaitlyn. That isn’t a mark against the show, which has a slightly Boy Meets World vibe in its early goings, though Duncanville has more references to technology, The Simpsons surrealism, but fewer After School Special type heart-to-heart talks. But like Boy Meets World’s protagonist Cory Matthews, Duncan is already the least interesting character on the show.
In fact, the show starts out emphasizing how average Duncan is, with a C+ report framed in his bedroom right by a disqualified medal and a participation trophy (a musty old joke about millennials that seems out of place for a show about a Gen Z teen). Duncan’s even having a dream about climbing a mountain called the Devil’s Anus. Apparently, all others have failed because they knew too much; Duncan believes his strength is that he’s a total amateur. He even meets Free Solo’s subject Alexandar Honnald, who gamely gives Duncan his Oscar, so in awe he is of Duncan’s abilities.
Duncan wakes up from his dream, just as Wonder Woman’s about to kiss him, to his parents excitedly rousing him from bed so his dad can teach him to drive. His dad, Jack, is voiced by Ty Burrell, who’s playing a much more interesting father than his Modern Family counterpart. He’s obsessed with bonding with his children to the point that every rejection of his love puts him in a deep depression. His references to his own abusive father makes his need for his children’s love and approval a lot sweeter than it has any right to be.
Duncan is terrible at driving, and totally unmotivated to change—until he’s hanging out with his friends and his crush Mia (perfect sunflower Rashida Jones) mentions seeing him driving. He gets a boner while talking to her, which is played for a laugh, obviously, but it’s not as funny as The Inbetweeners nor does it have as much pathos as Big Mouth. There’s always room to grow, though.
This crush motivates Duncan to ask his mother to teach him how to drive. She is happy to do so after he says he’ll help her with her errands, including being designated driver for her book club. Duncan’s friends (Betsy Sodoro, Yassir Lester, Zach Cherry) come with a few ready-made gags that’ll be fun to watch grow throughout the series. I think it’ll be interesting to see how these comedy veterans write about teens these days. It’s funny that one of the kids has a big enough Twitter presence to get free stuff, but whither Instagram? TikTok? DePop? Mia does sound a lot like Kaitlyn Dever’s character in Booksmart, at least.
Duncan’s friends end up getting tickets to an EDM concert and, with Mia’s help, pressure Duncan into saying he’ll take them. His mom refuses to be his designated adult, as he still just has a learner’s permit, so he sneaks out and they drag along Bex’s (Betsy Sodaro) grandmother. They all dress up and have a great time, even if their time includes setting off all the festival’s fireworks at once. It’s pretty cute. The only problem is when they hit Oakie, the town’s ancient witch lynching (!!) tree.
At breakfast Duncan can’t help but show his guilt, which is met by his parents’ disappointment. After they talk about how much the tree meant to them personally—they carved their initials into it in high school—Duncan goes out and with his friends drags the trunk of the tree home. He makes a huge freaking mess, but his parents forgive him for that too because he’s being so sweet; this, even after realizing the trunk is full of cicadas.
Though Duncanville is missing a compelling central character, it does have a lot of heart. The new kid on Fox’s animation block can actually be very fun and funny. Despite its very familiar flavor of network comedy, Duncanville is genuinely surprising in some parts, and sweet in others. The tag at the end of the family happily eating out of their car, with Jack sacrificing himself to the cicadas for some eggs, establishes just how tight-knit the family is, even if the show is very much still coming together.
Stray observations
- Wiz Khalifa (!) plays the Mr. Turner-esque (or maybe more Mr. Kraz-esque?) Mr. Mitch, who seems extremely cool to the kids at the school and extremely uncool in every other context. So maybe he’s more on the Mr. Kraz end of the spectrum.
- Duncan has two sisters, Kimberly (Riki Lindhome) and Jing (Joy Osmanski). They don’t have much to do with the plot of this episode, but the gag that Jing keeps insisting she’s going to marry Duncan is just the right amount of weird and pretty accurate as far as how little kids talk about marriage.
- Duncan swerves to avoid the popemobile when he’s learning how to drive.
- When Duncan takes too long to return to his dream, Wonder Woman ends up making out with Batman instead.
- Duncan asks why his dad can’t be cool like Captain “Sully” Sullenberger (voiced by Bill Hader), who appears at the end of the episode to fly him on his back when Duncan’s still high from the drugs from the EDM concert.
- Thanks for reading! We’ll return to Duncanville at the midseason and finale points.
25 Comments
Maybe I’ll check this out later. It’s weird to me that the character designs look like a mish-mosh of all the other FOX Sunday cartoon progrums.
Yeah. It seems like a just few mouse clicks to change the skins on the characters in the software, and out comes a new Fox Sunday cartoon.
It’s weird in motion too, one corner of a character’s face is a Seth Macfarlane design, another corner is Groening style, and also kinda Bob’s Burgers-y. It’s like an optical illusion where you let your eyes zone out to make it look like each Fox cartoon.
“Watching the premiere of Fox’s Duncanville, it can be easy to forget that series co-creator Amy Poehler voices both both Duncan and his mother.” i beg to differ. and look, i love amy as much as anyone but after this episode, i don’t know what makes this must-see tv.
Aaaand there is already porn of it.
This left a good first impression I thought. It was better than Bless The Harts, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t all that good either. Duncanville is much more lively. They are off to a good start but we’ll see if it lasts.
i agree the harts is less lively, but i think that’s the point. it’s clearly going for realism like KOTH, which also took some time to get its feet. duncanville seems a little too much like the litany of other cartoons which didn’t make it, like napoleon dynamite, wacky, but not too wacky.
a participation trophy (a musty old joke about millennials that seems out of place for a show about a Gen Z teen)They’ve been making those jokes for decades, long before the millennial.
This image reminds me, the plot in the episode is taken straight from The Simpsons episode “The Telltale Head”, although instead of a statue, it’s a tree in Duncanville.Still, the show was surprisingly light, flowed well, and genuinely funny at points. Hope they can grow, and I’ll likely tune in to see it do so.
Most of the takes on millennials are just recycled takes about Gen X.
It’s not bad, really, it just feels like a big step backwards. This show is a contemporary of The Goode Family, or the Cleveland Show. Watching it now, when the standards for animation are more substantial, well thought out, pov-centric offerings like Tuca & Bertie, Bojack Horseman, and Big Mouth, Duncanville feels like a show with nothing new to say, and no point of view to represent or explore.
Hey – Cory Matthews was an interesting protagonist – especially in the later seasons as the show became more of an ensemble!
They basically turned him into an extremely nebbishy old Jewish man, which was particularly funny given how WASPy the rest of his family was.
Yes – a strange transition from the “all-american boy” they started with, but an improvement. Poor Eric on the other hand, I mean, Will Friedle made being the dumb character in a comedy work (one of the very finite examples – so many examples of that backfiring in other comedies to create noxiously annoying teeth-grinders) & I can see how the gig got him Ron Stoppable on Kim Possible (where I knew him first prior to seeing Boy meets World), butby the end he really was unrecognisable from his s1 wise big bro character.
This kind of character design has only worked once on Fox, with King of The Hill, a modest hit (and great show). All the other successful comedies use an exaggerated, giant-eyed character design: Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers.Seems like you can be as weird as you want as long as your characters are cute enough. Why not just stick with what works?
Bless the Harts uses a much different design than all the other Fox cartoons. You could argue that Bob’s Burgers does too but Duncanville looks 80% similar, so that show is no longer it’s unique thing.
Not particularly a fan after the first episode. The show kind of needs to pick a lane. It’s really cheesy, with at least a couple sight gag jokes that are literally just the things the characters just said (“Duncan runs funny” – cut to Duncan running funny; “nothing fun in this town” – cut to “fun in town” amusement park literally right behind them), and then sometimes it’s just a bit explicit for the sake of being explicit (there wasn’t anything funny at all about the boner bit, especially the fact that for some reason it talked?). It’s pretty breakneck speed, but then it has some slow Family Guy type humor that drags on way too long (the cartwheel). The little sister character is already creepy. I don’t understand how Duncan’s head works, because his skull should be sticking out a bit from that very aggressive side cut.Probably should have been on something like Cartoon Network instead? It feels like filler comedy, and while I can really appreciate over-the-top humor like dragging a whole tree in a house, the show doesn’t seem to particularly do it right. I think Bless the Harts at least has more of its own individual style, whereas this is just Family Guy trying to be Hey Arnold.
Did they use Calen Landry Jones as the model for Duncan? Cause wow it looks like Caleb
Amy’s first cartoon was a million times better.
I’d give it a B, but having Betsy Sodaro automatically bumps it up to A-. She is a treasure.
that masked singer/kyle bornheimer joke got me
Seems promising. Maybe it’s because it’s the pilot and it essentially has to introduce all the characters, but I hope it tones down some of the energy in some of the later episodes. It felt like a lot of things happened in a short period of time.
I’m going to give the whole first season a try since I love so many of those involved. It was… fine, but “He runs so weird” > cut to Duncan’s strange run made me laugh really, really hard and I would like a GIF. This could become something pretty good.
To me, it was a nice filler between something like The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers…which is probably exactly what they were going for.
The writing is already extremely snappy, I have good hopes for this show.