(A tip o’ the hat to whatever coked-up IMDb user thought the above sentence would be a good selling point).
Caught the premiere of The Boondocks last night, and it surpassed my expectations. For the most part, comic strip-to-sitcom adaptations suck hard, and I had very little hope that this would be any more than an American anime revue with some too-easy racial satire. Which would have been a disappointment, as I love the strip and Aaron McGruder’s writing.
Fortunately, McGruder came on board for the show as well, and if the results are bit diluted compared to the source material, it’s still pretty bracing for American TV. Certainly, the language is pretty harsh, and the show makes full use of the “n-word isn’t bad if black people say it” exemption. Other than that, the show hews very close in tone to the original, which should be taken as a compliment.
If I have a complaint, and it’s not a small one, it’s that a lot of the humor seems a little bit too broad, as though it were padding to boost the plot up to 22 minutes. I can’t imagine the comic strip showing a white man fall backwards out of a second story window after receiving a shotgun blast to the be-kevlared chest, but it happens here. Que sera, sera. It’s not even that it doesn’t work with the narrative, but it doesn’t really “gel” as much as I’d hoped.
Being as the show is on Adult Swim, the animation is also a bit…how can I put this…there’s stylization, and then there’s cheapness, and the genius of Adult Swim is in combining the two, but sometimes you can tell when corners were cut for budget. It looks good as fine as it isn’t moving.
I’ll definitely be putting this one on the DVR schedule.