Season Review: “Animals” Season Two

Did this series even DESERVE the third season pickup? Find out here.

When we did the write up for the first season of Animals, despite the fact that the franchise would be ranked in the top ten best animated shows of the year, we did see some room for improvement. For starters, we wanted to see a better variety in animals, more consistent storytelling, and a better job at selecting voice actors for their acting ability rather than their name value. The other deal was to kind of shave off some experimentation, and fine-tune the things that the producers Mike Luciano and Phil Matarese are good at i.e. writing funny and witty dialogue, giving us cute characters with potty mouths, and making sure the heart shines through in a show where the color aesthetics are way more dark and dingy than some of the franchise’s competition.

Like last season’s “Squirrels”, we got a two-part effort in “Cats”, but unlike the show’s first season, Mike and Phil seemed to be going more in the realm of “spoof” with an effort that draws parallels with Sons of Anarchy and The Sopranos, a novel idea given the network that Animals calls home. Unfortunately, just like last season, the guys gave us a two-parter that very well could’ve been fine-tuned a bit, and fit into a single episode as opposed to a stretched out “Cats” two-parter with a shitty Christmas episode of “Owls” stuck in the middle…it’s like an Oreo nobody asked for. Perhaps a more concise effort on the “Cats” front would’ve lead to a higher score, because the second part was written like the longest 30-minutes of your natural life.

But, that wasn’t even the worst part of Animals Season Two…not by a mile. You see, I would’ve eaten an entire package of the aforementioned shitty Oreos in exchange for the 30-minutes back I wasted watching the live-action tragedy sketch series known as “Humans“. Aside from the stellar performance from RuPaul Charles, “Humans” was a friggin’ disaster from start to finish with no conceivable sign of getting better as the episode went on. A sore and infected wart on an otherwise decent looking face that is the Animals franchise. The odd thing is, the “Humans” bits were actually pretty well done and pretty funny in their animated portions over the course of the episode, but “Humans” the episode looked like it was straight out of film pre-school with the assignment being, “try your best at being The Chappelle’s Show”. 

Fortunately, for the series, with the little bad comes the good. Despite the fact that I think Phil and Mike might be running out of ideas for new and fresh animals to use seeing as how we’ve had a total of six “rats” episodes four “Cats” episodes, and about another half a dozen episodes about different species of birds over the course of the 20 episodes of Animals that have aired so far, I usually don’t mind it. I think the “Words Birds Possums” episode is what I was expecting more of, or given how the first season ended, something to do with the apes or more sci-fi shit in the laboratory.

I actually liked a lot of the guest stars this season, and thought they were better cast as compared to last year, nothing really stands out as revolutionary, but everyone that was brought in seemed to be a great fit for what the producers were going with. I do think that Phil and Mike could use some of that directorial assistance that they got in the show’s first season from the likes of Wes Archer and Dominic Polcino, two guys who have treasure troves of knowledge when it comes to directing animated shows and is seen as fairly evident in the show’s first season, that same knowledge was missing in Animals Season Two. 

What Mike and Phil do best, is write…and that’s fairly evident in the show’s second season. Hilarity ensues when you’ve got “rat” sitting on top of a baby getting ready to wrestle dressed up as Sting, or the exquisite insight in threading together the “Words Birds Possum” episode where you didn’t know who to root for at the end, but we got the ending we wanted anyway. The crazy ending for the rats in the “Dog” episode, once again setting the stage for a potential smorgasbord of story possibilities with all of the animals roaming NYC with no people around.

Animals is a great show, definitely deserving of a third season nod from HBO. However, Phil and Mike still have a lot of work to do in crafting a series that can surpass the likes of Life and Times of Tim in terms of both notoriety and life span. They have a bunch of the tools to do it, now it’s a matter of those guys picking the correct tools at the correct time and crafting the level of quality that we, the viewers, know they can muster.