Of course, there are general questions about what the Netflix animation department has learned from any of its successes or failures. It was a tactic that didn’t work at all on Hoops and never found consistency Chicago Party Aunt I’m not going to try explaining for the fiftieth time why F is for Family remains the difficult-to-achieve model for this sort of Netflix series. Inside Job continues an odd trend among Netflix animated comedies of starting with characters and situations in the most abrasive place possible and then attempting to evolve to someplace more affectionate and grounded by midseason. It’s ironic that the season’s best episode focuses on a mission to a town trapped by an ’80s nostalgia chemical agent, a half-hour dedicated to countless nostalgic references and countless criticisms about how mind-numbing nostalgia is. It’s so hung-up on Easter eggs and in-jokes and screen-filling, pause-requiring visual gags that the show becomes exhausting at times, especially in the early episodes.Īs Inside Job goes along and thankfully lets the team escape the bowels of Cognito, there are better stories in which the conspiracy-of-the-week is either an afterthought or simply an instigation for adventures that don’t mention the Deep State at all. Even if Glenn is basically just Futurama‘s DiMaggio working in Bender-adjacent voice mode, the character is grotesque enough to get laughs, especially in one above-average episode in which he and Brett engage in Face/Off-related hijinks.Īnd yes, the episode references Face/Off in very specific terms, just as almost everything in Inside Job feels like it’s a direct reference to a movie, a TV show, a family conspiracy theory or to Netflix itself. Andre, Gigi and Myc remain formulaically odd space-fillers with no real comic voices to speak of, especially annoying when you have vocal talent like Gelman, who couldn’t give a boring line-reading if he tried. Most of the supporting characters haven’t found that additional step from quirky to appealingly funny either. You’re a show with Sasquatches, literal sheeple and celebrity clones and yet your creativity surrounding a difficult woman gets stuck in this rudimentary first gear? Maybe if Rand weren’t such a predictably dull, egomaniacal character I wouldn’t have minded seeing Reagan’s psychology tethered so completely and unimaginatively to him. I was particularly perplexed when a whole episode seemingly built to an Asperger’s diagnosis, a totally worthwhile thing to delve into in an adult cartoon, and then disappointed when it became a “Yeah, daddy issues again” shrug. Voiced with trademark tartness by Caplan, Reagan is an unapologetically prickly centerpiece for the show, though it’s bizarre how frequently the series takes the things that could be interesting or unique about the character and reduces them to daddy issues tied to the one-note, grating Rand. But when it comes time for her to get a big promotion, she has to share the job with Brett (Clark Duke), a completely unqualified yes-man.Ī poster boy for white male privilege, Brett is actually fairly well-meaning, which immediately causes Reagan’s co-workers - gossipy Gigi (Tisha Campbell), man-dolphin hybrid Glenn (John DiMaggio), jerky mushroom Myc (Brett Gelman) and drug-addled Dr. The daughter of former Cognito bigwig Rand (Christian Slater), Reagan is brilliant, profane - the show is surely not for the kiddies - socially awkward and bent on world domination. Our heroine is Reagan Ridley (Lizzy Caplan), a tech genius working at Cognito Inc., the public-facing company secretly orchestrating many of the world’s darkest conspiracies on behalf of a group of shadowy overlords. Or at least those episodes are the ones that made me wince less? But through 10 episodes, it’s still struggling to define its supporting characters and its best episodes just happen to be the ones that stray furthest from the core premise. Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Christian Slater, Clark Duke, Andrew Daly, Bobby Lee, John DiMaggio, Tisha Campbell, Brett GelmanĬreated by Shion Takeuchi and executive produced by Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch, Inside Job has a lot of energy - too much energy, I often felt - and a near-infinite number of potential storylines to mine.
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