Season Review: Legends of Chamberlain Heights Season One

Does this series deserve “Legendary” status just yet? Find out in this review of the whole season.

 

Even before the show’s first season premiered, Legends of Chamberlain Heights was well on its way in producing a second season set to premiere next Fall on Comedy Central. Despite the grade, I’m actually kind of excited to see what the producers of the series is going to give us next season.

And yes, there’s a BUNCH to like about this show. The Bento Box production table is filled with the who’s who of people that have produced some really great animation. Co-creator Brad Ableson is a long-time Simpsons producer while Carl Jones’ (Black Dynamite/The Boondocks) resume speaks for itself. And come on! Erykah Badu is your music supervisor!! I’ve also grown to really love the aesthetic of the series. Nothing too crazy, very simple, certainly reminds anyone watching the series of early South Park, looking more like cartoons walking around the funny pages of the back page of the Sunday paper than anything remotely close to the lush backgrounds of say a Futurama. 

But, I do think the show’s first season had a lot of growing pains. The best way I can equate this is by looking at the sport of which this show is mainly based off of…basketball. Ya see, early on in the show’s season, I saw Legends of Chamberlain Heights really coming off as like the early 2015 or 2011 arrivals of Lebron James to the Cavs and Heat respectively. Both times, the best player in the world had to share a court with other really good players, and it’s the coach’s job to figure out how all these pieces fit together and make a functioning unit that will eventually comprise of a lethal court assailant that can just win titles.

And guess what? Both times…it worked. It just takes time to see those teams coalesce into something lethal, and I think that’s what we saw early on with Legends of Chamberlain Heights. The first bunch of episodes released, and I think it was a lot of the writers’ voices going off at once with no real discernation of where the show is going. Fortunately, that started to change near the latter half of the season.

It was in the latter half of the season that I think we really started to see growth in the characters and some good heart come out of the show. My FAVORITE parts of the show all revolve around the kids on the basketball court jockeying for their 15 minutes of fame. This certainly comes to a head in the finale, and it helped the show achieve its highest score.

And it isn’t like this show doesn’t have the talent to do it, neither. Jay Pharoah is going to be a voice superstar one of these days on the level of Seth MacFarlane, I know it, and his take as Montrelle and Pete is just a small sampling of a voice talent that I think can TAKE OVER a show. But anyone that KNEW Jay before the show even premiered was certainly aware of his talent. What was WAY more fun was the unknowns Quinn Hawking and Josiah Johnson. Both guys definitely showcased the chops in being very good writers, exceptional voices, and astute producers of a TV series that definitely crosses the lines in terms of stereotypes, explicit humor, and storytelling, all of which make for good laughs.

However, THAT’S the battle that I think needed to subside for Legends of Chamberlain Heights to be successful. I think gone are the days where truly original humor comes from interlacing slightly racist/possibly homophobic rhetoric with dialogue and in are the days where the target audience maybe wants to see more of the heart shine through, and I think that absolutely happened with “Grover’s” journey during the course of the show’s first season. In maybe an unintentional way, the writers gave us a “hero” character that makes mistakes and learns his lessons which is all the fun of being in high school with your friends.

THAT’S the show we need. There isn’t much-animated comedy that takes place in high school geared towards male demographics on TV and Legends of Chamberlain Heights has all the tools of being that show. If the producers can give us a bunch of that for an entire season, then we’ve got ourselves a winner.