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The Great North

The Great North season 4

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Paul Asay

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Episode Reviews

TV Series Review

Look at the title, and you might be tempted to say, “The Great North? Hmmmph. What’s so great about it?”

Don’t say that within earshot of Beef Tobin, one of the great denizens of this Great North. For him, this corner of Alaska isn’t just great: It’s the Greatest North ever. What could be greater than living in the middle of nowhere, fishing in icy waters from dusk ‘til dawn and spending time with your family? Like, all the time in the world with them?

Yep, every father’s dream. It’s worth putting up with the weekly family squabble and fending off the occasional rabid moose.

Land of the Midnight Fun?

It’s not that the Tobin family squabbles that much. Everyone gets along reasonably well, in fact. Eldest son Wolf lives in the guest house with his more urbane (but Alaska-curious) wife, Honeybee—despite Wolf’s obvious, if occasional, same-sex leanings. Middle son Ham announces that he’s gay every now and then, too, but Beef’s got no beef with that. (Plus, Ham’s made a good name for himself as the town’s Cake Lady.) Moon, the family’s youngest lad, just might be the most Alaskan of them all, wandering around as he does in a bear outfit.

And then there’s Beef’s only daughter, Judy, who works part time at the mall and has a crush on one of its smoothie makers. Sure, perhaps she dreams sometimes of leaving this corner of Alaska and going somewhere where the moose aren’t quite so rabid, just like her mentor/imaginary friend Alanis Morissette suggests that she should. But Judy’s only 16, and she’s got plenty of time to think about her future. For now, being with her dad, her brothers and several hundred miles of untamed wilderness is just fine.

Why, Judy doesn’t even miss her deadbeat mother at all.

Rank-oridge

The Great North, part of Fox’s always-strong and ever-crass rotation of adult animated comedies, is both funnier and sweeter than some. Made by the same folks behind Bob’s Burgers (and featuring Parks and Rec’s Nick Offerman as the voice of Beef), this show is a family show … in the sense that it revolves around a loving, tight-knit and slightly insane family.

Alas, it’s not made for families to watch.

The Great North and Bob’s Burgers not only look the same; they feel the same, down to their treks into bathroom humor, sexualized jokes and, oddly enough, plots revolving around possible cannibalism. The laughs are interspersed with blushes and winces. Language can be as blue as a vanishing Alaskan glacier.

Some viewers will appreciate the show’s heart, and it does have heart aplenty. But it often sets its crosshairs lower. For those who wonder what’s so great about this slice of animated North and decide to bypass Beef and instead ask a discerning mom or pop, the answer just might be that it ain’t so great after all.

Episode Reviews

Jan. 7, 2024—S4, Ep1: “Bad Speecher Adventure”

Ham is scheduled to give a presentation on the subject of “Alaska Wow” for his speech class, trumpeting the glories of the 49th state. Worse, the speech will be in dreaded “Room 15,” where his brother, Moon, and Moon’s fellow elementary-school students notoriously destroy anyone who dares make a presentation. (Moon promises Ham that he’ll be the one to pick the “last bit of gristle off your bones.”) Desperate for a wow-worthy topic, Ham asks several family members to come up with suggestions. They do—though each bears a curious similarity to a popular movie.

Judy talks about how Bob Ross got his start in Alaska—but in her version (in which she plays “Bob-Judy Ross”), the painter was also in a piloting program known as Snow Gun, and Bob-Judy was constantly killing his navigators because he painted during flights. We see one die in an explosion, and Bob-Judy’s supervisor reminds Bob-Judy that it’s the eighth such navigator killed. Bob-Judy’s ninth partner, Goose, is an actual goose, who dies, too. (We see a cloud of feathers, partly in flame, float by.) Goose’s wife (also a goose) dies from the impact of a champagne bottle cork, leaving behind a honking gosling. (I’m guessing its name is Ryan.)

Bob-Judy’s story is interrupted by Wolf’s narration of Top Gun’s infamous volleyball scene—a scene that somehow finds its way into the other movie-related stories that follow. In each, well-muscled animated men glisten with animated oil as they dive for loose balls, slap each other’s rears and occasionally walk away from the camera, arm-in-arm. In one scene, Wolf tells us they’re wearing leather shorts.

Every Alaska Wow story features a switch of gender for the story’s main character—men becoming women for the sake of the tale. We visit a dystopian world where everyone floats in containers of goo. (The main character of the story makes several references to toilets.) In another story, a 14-year-old girl visits a bar and, while her best friend drinks beer, she consumes a ginger ale. (Beer and champagne are consumed elsewhere, as well.) A couple of “vague but definitely evil bad guys” die in fighter jets. A pony is crushed by a giant flag. Two characters fight. Characters say “d–n” about seven times and use other profanities (“a–,” “b–ch” and “h—“) as well. God’s name is misused twice.

When we’re not in a fictionalized Alaska Wow tale, Moon describes how he and his fellow classmates eagerly dismantle speakers in their class, and he mocks and belittles his family members around the dinner table (suggesting he’s in a vindictive groove). Ham worries he might urinate in his pants during the presentation. Someone describes Moon as “demonic.” Wolf worries that, if he doesn’t learn which side of the plate a fork goes on, he’ll never know what to do if he’s “crowned princess of a small European country.”

Feb. 14, 2021 – S1, E1: “Sexi Moose Adventure”

It’s Judy’s 16th birthday, and father Beef is excited about celebrating it while fishing aboard the family boat (which is where they spend most days). But Judy has a secret, too: She got a job working at a photo store in the local mall, but she doesn’t know how to tell her father that she doesn’t necessarily want to spend all her time with the family.

Beef is still mourning over the loss of his wife. She’s not dead and all the kids know it, but he pretends that she was eaten by wild animals and keeps her fur bikini and hair extensions as mementos of her. (We see a picture of the woman in said bikini.) When a child almost lets slip that their mom lives in Pennsylvania, another cuts him off and says that she’s in “pen-cil heaven.” (She was a terrible mom, by the way: She named the family dog “Grandma” so that if someone asked where the kids were, she could honestly say that that’s who they were with. She now shoplifts with her lover and blogs about it.)

Judy wonders whether it’d be possible to pretend to have diarrhea every Tuesday and Thursday, so that she could go to her job without hurting her father’s feelings. She and her pretend best friend, Alana Morissette, discuss how a slightly older boy’s tight pants accentuate certain aspects of him. (They also have conversations about “grabbing life’s butt cheeks,” which get more descriptive from there.)

Someone breaks a leg and resigns himself to die in the woods. Beef debates whether his wife’s goodbye letter featured a picture of a middle finger or a penis. A moose invades the Tobin cabin, and some balloons spelling out “sixteen” get tangled up in its antlers (spelling “sexin” and, when the “n” pops, “sexi”.) Someone loses his pants. Ham announces that he’s gay. (The family tells him he’s come out several times in the past and that they all love and support him.) Several bathroom-related gags are made. Character say “a–,” “b–ch,” “crap” and “d–n” and misuse God’s name.

Feb. 14, 2021, Episode Two: “The Feast of Not People Festival”

The Tobin family prepares to initiate Wolf’s wife, Honeybee, into one of the town’s most celebrated shindigs—one commemorating the early settlers’ switch from cannibalism to a more typical Alaskan diet. Wolf will be competing with his father, Beef, in the annual Cadaver Dash (where they must collect people pretending to be dead, like a macabre Easter egg hunt), and Wolf is terrified about letting his father down. Middle son Ham is terrified for an entirely different reason: He’s secretly become the town’s official “Cake Lady,” baking cakes for several celebrations under the guise of someone else. But baking a cake for the Feast of Not People Festival is a grave challenge.

Wolf shows his siblings an anatomically correct chart of how he hopes to remake his body (in a weekend) to be capable of carrying as many fake corpses as possible. (“Do you have to be nude?” one asks, seeing the chart. Wolf reassures them that he drew someone else’s male anatomy.) The day of the race, though, he puts his grabby corpse-carrying gloves on inside out and rips up his hands something awful. (We see animated cuts and hashmarks.) This causes him to wet his pants, which he and Beef make mention of several times for the rest of the episode.

Moon teaches Honeybee how to play a corpse for the Cadaver Dash. Wolf’s eventual cake is of a dead person—a way for the town, he says, to face its fears. (The cake’s filling is runny red Jell-O.) We see a flashback to the original settlers as they dine on fallen neighbors. (The scene is not particularly graphic, with only the narration really making clear what’s happening.) We hear lots of conversation (and several jokes) revolving around cannibalism. Someone talks provocatively about how another person’s cake is so moist as to be almost damp. We hear jokes related to bathroom activities and flatulence. Ham and Judy conduct what Ham later refers to as a “non-sexual role-playing exercise.”

Characters say “d–mit” and misuse God’s name.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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