Review: Animals “Squirrels”

If you wanna talk about the most underrated series of the year, start here.

Spoilers Below

Ahhh haaaaa. Not sure if it was coincidental, but if you recall in my review of episode 109 of Animals, I noted that the episode would’ve worked a whole bunch better if not split in half between two episode and instead mushed into one and that’s exactly what happened in this season’s take on the “Squirrels”.

The main premise of this week’s episode revolves around Phil and Mike’s mom (voiced by Katie Aselton) getting married to Pat (Pauly Shore) and Phil’s not taking it too well for a few reasons:

1) He hates Pat.

2) He probably hates his soon-to-be stepbrother Mason (Paul Rust) even more so.

Any child of divorced parents handles the split in a variety of ways, and writers Phil and Mike do an excellent job of showing two different, albeit slightly cliched but totally legitimate avenues. For the slightly older goth kid Mike, it’s trying to fuck his cousin, for Phil it’s more of a stubbornness and doing whatever he can to destroy the procession. Eventually, Phil learns that all alcohol is the cause and solution to all of life’s problems and that he’s just gonna have to put up with the fact that his mom wants to be happy.

For any kid raised in the 90’s and appreciates the pop culture of the decade will be tickled to death with punchlines featuring Third-Eye Blind, Marilyn Manson, Dumb & Dumber, and anything with Pauly Shore in it. As a matter of fact, I want to give props to Mr. Shore, because I always felt he should’ve done more voice-acting in his career because he’s always had a great pitch and levity in his joke delivery that would probably have served him well. Jon Lovitz revisits the woodland creatures with not quite as endearing take as “Ben” whence compared to the previous episode, though it was made up for by the plethora of new squirrel characters. Mindy Kaling’s “Sandy” was excellent as was Rust’s “Mason”, the latter of which queued one of the funnier moments of the episode with his waltz down the aisle. Fans of the first round of “Squirrels” episodes will be delighted to see the returns of Jake, Amir, and Pete Wengert return as different ancillary characters that fill out the cast nicely, especially Jake and Amir’s banter as the two servers teeing up the climax with a Spinal Tap riff.

I’m loving watching the growth of Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano as writers, I think they love straddling that border between comedy and drama that is so fucking rare on broadcast TV, thank the fuck, Christ, they’re on HBO. The show isn’t about setting up haymaker punchlines, instead, when these guys are on their game, they bring BoJack Horseman level dramedy sequences that aren’t getting the same level of Emmy-nominated respect that they deserve. If the show doesn’t get a third season, it has NOTHING to do with the production or writing efforts and has everything to do with lack of network support.