Review: Mike Tyson Mysteries “Help a Brother Out”

Your ass is DeGrasse…Tyson.

Spoilers Below

After a year wait, we return for the third season of Mike Tyson Mysteries, the parody/tribute/absurdist deconstruction of Hanna-Barbera mystery cartoons and celebrity based action cartoons, starring Mike Tyson, who I really have to give points to for agreeing to this whole thing. Not that the show isn’t funny as hell, it’s just that you gotta have some serious professionalism to be willing to play a distilled parody of yourself as the main gimmick of an ongoing series.

We open on…the ending of last season’s episode about demons and Christian youth? Uh…okay. So the house burned down at the end of that episode, and the team looks for a place to crash since Mike lost his wallet. This leads them to the apartment of Deezy, Mike’s agent, and really the only thing close to a recurring character on the show. This proves to not be a great plan, as Deezy’s place looks less like an apartment and more like the first scene in any given cop show involving a dead prostitute and/or drug bust gone wrong. After that, the team swing by Mike’s “nerd” brother…who turns out to be world-renown astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, surprisingly NOT voicing himself. Seems he threw Mike off during a boxing match by throwing him a Vulcan salute and they haven’t talked since, and showing up in the middle of the night with his daughter, a ghost, and a talking pigeon is not helping the divide, so that option’s out too. Not taking no for an answer, Mike forces open the garage so they can at least sleep in the van there and turns on the engine for warmth, nearly killing them. Luckily Deezy’s cat stowed away with them and calls Deezy to keep them from suffocating (after a brief detour to Neil PATRICK HARRIS’ house). So things are looking up for the Mystery Team, and even more so for Deezy, who finally has people, he’ll be able to talk to break through his depression…until Mike finds his wallet and they decide to go to a hotel. Oh, Deezy. Deezy, Deezy, Deezy.

Having grown up on Scooby Doo and other mystery cartoons, I can appreciate MTM’s constant use of misdirection of expectations to land a good gig, and this episode has quite a few of those. For one, we’re continuing on from an episode last season that was pretty par for the course for this show, even though the last finale (“The Farmer’s Daughter”) seemed like a more appropriate jumping off point. Though they do comment on it about thirty seconds in, so I guess they were counting on some eyebrow raising. Plus we know this show is a slave to the status quo, so looks like everything’ll be reset by the next episode. So maybe this is a parody of two-parters in general?

Another mislead would probably the reveal of Neil DeGrasse Tyson as Mike’s brother. Usually, the celebrity guest is utilized to build the conflict for the story, where here it’s just for a quick joke about the two having the same last name (which I’m actually surprised they didn’t do sooner). Looking back, it’s not exactly new for MTM to use celebrities like this, since they did the same with John Updike, Buzz Aldrin, and Robert Redford before him, but Neil does tend to put his face and voice on a lot of stuff. I mean, the guy lends his voice and likeness to stuff like Family Guy, Zoolander 2 and Ice Age 5, so you think he’d be up for this, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.

This is also the most of Deezy we have ever gotten and…I gotta say, it’s pretty depressing. Not that I don’t know that was the intent, but you would think there would be more to this guy who hangs around Mike here and there than a crappy apartment and a semi-intelligent cat. Poor guy. Hope he’s okay.

The new season starts out like the first two, with a clever reworking of expected tropes and standard jokes. Though with a lot more “Huh? Oh…okay” than straight up laughs. I’m starting to think this show might be more clever than it is funny if that makes sense, but we’ll see as we go.