Review: Harvey Beaks “Break the Lake” ; “The Amazing Harvey”

This show quite simply is…amazing.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

“Break the Lake”

The lake spirit’s mother shows up to try and force her to marry some dude she doesn’t want to marry, but she opts to stay in her like instead because she likes playing with the Littlebark kids. At first, mother disproves, but eventually comes around and lets her daughter live her life as she wants.

“The Amazing Harvey”

After watching a tape, Harvey inspires to be a magician like the Amazing Andy so long as he doesn’t dispel how he does his magic tricks. Problem is, Dade thinks that Harvey has become a dark wizard, and as a result, can’t be friends with Harvey until he tells Dade how he does his tricks. Eventually, the two split and Harvey runs into Andy who offers up some advice, and even inspires Harvey to hire on Dade as his assistant which repairs the friendship but still allows Harvey to keep his magic secrets.

Our Take

When it comes to montages, Harvey Beaks has been a show that’s done a good job of not being over-reliant on them, and yet we got two of them tonight. The latter of the two was more indicative of the type you’d see on this show, but the musical number for “Break the Lake” was fantastic. As it pertains to the aforementioned episode, I love that the cast of characters of this show is so big that we can spend a bunch of time with the spirits and their families and get to know their back stories. A lot of shows, Family Guy keeps coming to mind, introduces a bevy of characters that aren’t even as ancillary as the lake spirit, and yet we hear nothing from them. Harvey Beaks does the opposite, having no problem giving us episodes with Randl or Blister or, in this case, the lake spirit.

“The Amazing Harvey” was rather enjoyable as well, and I particularly liked Andy. He’s a character I would’ve liked to have seen more of in future seasons because he’s got this “single guy losery” complex about him that older audiences would get a kick out of all the while marveling at the artwork the show employs whilst floating Harvey into his window. Compelling stuff and this show was canceled, why?