Review: Animals “Humans”

What in the literal fuck was that?

For a season and a half, there hasn’t been a producer or a team of producers that have shown the sort of growth in being showrunners/writers/producers of an animated series as have Mike Luciano and Phil Matarese. The duo has become rather adept at storytelling and eventually giving us a show that had at its start felt more like a sketch series, to now a weekly series that has really defined its own characteristics, and as such, produced far better efforts for the show’s second season.

In the episode entitled “Humans” we get about five minutes total of any sort of animation, that which includes the intro, the outro, and Jonah Hill’s pretty hilarious take on “The President” for like a minute or so. The rest is live-action and with the new art direction of the series, it’s painfully obvious that we reverted back to the randomness that was prevalent on the show’s first season when the producers were really trying to feel themselves out and experiment instead of the fine-tuned machine that was working so well this season.

That said, “Humans”, isn’t 100% turd. Of everyone that was a part of this episode, I think special recognition has to be given to RuPaul Charles. A lot of people probably overlook RuPaul’s career on TV and film because he’s won so many awards for hosting reality shows, but by far and away RuPaul was the glue holding this episode together in both comedic value and acting ability. Funny cameos dot the rest of the 20 minutes, the “Admen” and “Nurses” segments should please your Adult Swim fans, and the Lizard Man is great and should have his own TV show.

Unfortunately, the script has shades of just about every Millenial-skewing sci-fi film of the past 10 years, and most of the dialogue drowns in unnecessary crassness, even for an HBO series. When it comes to crass dialogue, I’ve always felt the best recipes of a show that’s allowed to script that way is to sort of “season” the pages like you would a steak with salt and pepper that’s cooked just right. “Humans” is like still having to eat the meal that’s left for you after you find out that your buddy loosened the salt shaker as you were attempting to get a sprinkle.

It probably wouldn’t have been a problem if “Humans” was presented as a TRUE spoof of sci-fi, but when your season one cliffhanger ends in a lab and continues through up until this point, you would think there would have been more of a concise route for the episode to go, but it’s really just a big fucking mess. There’s some light social commentary in there for the liberal kids, but we get enough of that everywhere else, too. At best, this episode is the one you make after you’ve already found out that your show isn’t going to be renewed, so you just kinda do this one as the series finale and go the punk rock route into the sunset.

As I’m watching this episode, I’m reminded of released concept albums by Metallica with Lulu and Megadeth’s Risk where you know the band itself is really, really good at what they do, but they make the ONE record that the fan bases agree suck ass and wishing they were never made. Similarily, Animals has a really good band behind it, but “Humans” was absolutely the “Risk” that I hope never happens again.