REVIEW:  VINNY & THE COLONEL First Three Episodes

Does the web series deserve a promotion?

OVERVIEW

Vinny Gill and Colonel Peppersnacks are your average air-breathing, land-walking, ghetto-dwelling fish with apparent aspirations of making it in the rap game.  Those aspirations are only apparent, as the inciting incident of the pilot episode stems from someone trolling their most recent rap video.

Each week the two fish find themselves in increasingly bizarre situations and idiotically stumble through each one.  For instance, in the pilot, Vinny and Colonel take offense at being labeled fuckboys on social media, they take drastic measures and decide to check themselves into a clinic to rid them of their fuckboy behavior.  But they quickly discover their doctor is insane and is dead set on diagnosing everyone as a fuckboy so he can torture them.

OUR TAKE

There is certainly some promise here, and some comparisons can be drawn to shows like AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE, both good and bad.  The good is that the world, the characters, and the bizarre storylines all have promise for a long-running web series that could potentially even become a longer, quarter-hour program.  The animation style (a blend of animated characters and live-action backgrounds) works well too.

The bad is that, as an audience, we will need to be patient and let this show find its footing a bit more.  Just like with Season 1 of ATHF, the characters aren’t quite there yet and are, at times, inconsistent or make decisions that don’t follow.  In the second episode, Vinny couldn’t care less about the discovery of a severed thumb in the neighborhood until The Colonel suggests they call the cops about it.  Suddenly Vinny decides, instead of calling the authorities, they need to get to the bottom of it themselves and implement street justice.  Vinny’s sudden decision to spring to action feels strange given that one moment ago he didn’t even care someone’s thumb might have been violently cut off by criminals. 

Too much of the humor derives, not from the character, but from the crass and expletive language.  While, like SOUTH PARK’S earliest episodes, there is some fun in the novelty of kids cursing, there is some of that same thing here.  But it wears thin quickly as the language reads more as a substitute for character-based humor.  

The best episode is certainly the third and most recent wherein a ghetto and politically incorrect genie shows what Vinny and Colonel’s lives would have been like without each other.  The genie is a great character and both Vinny and The Colonel become a little sharper as characters.  This gives hope that the characters will continue to develop, that the series’ voice will come into focus, and the overall series will improve.  We can only hope that Comedy Central gives Vinny and The Colonel the time to do so.