Season Review: Deep Space 69 Season Four

Sometimes jokes don’t age all that well…especially if you’re telling pretty much the same one over and over again.

For example, there used to be a time when the Cheech & Chong obligatory montage featuring bong rips and whatever else was hilarious, but the concept is very much of that time period. With the growth of cannabis culture to the point where it’s almost federally not a crime anymore, the foundations of which those jokes were built on are no longer as solid. Do those conventions and tropes still show up? Sure! But the marketplace will tell you they aren’t as profitable anymore and as a result, you seldom see any movies or TV shows doing cliched pot humor anymore in favor of characters that might be in a movie or TV show that smokes pot but is really just as trivial as someone else eating a banana.

Deep Space 69 suffers from this in a sense, but instead of pot humor, it’s the sex-related humor that isn’t really timely anymore. Is it funny that Jay lights to have sex with everything that moves? Sure, but even Family Guy’s Quagmire is slowly but surely being squeezed from doing those gags anymore and instead the cartoon-watching public likes their sex humor in the way of saying Big Mouth where sex is part of the landscape of which to tell funny stories but it isn’t the punchline anymore. Deep Space 69, unfortunately, hasn’t really matured all that much after four seasons and actually this is one of the few cases where the longer run-times for the series I think actually hurt the franchise. If this show was eight episodes at five minutes apiece, ok, cliche sex jokes become easier pills to swallow. But, 12-minutes for each of the eight episodes start to wear on you, and the overall plot of the series isn’t quite there to keep you interested.

Not to say the show doesn’t have its strengths because it does. Brad Gage as the”Red Panda” is an excellent character, but was seldom used and almost of little importance for the duration of the show, especially if you’re like me and you waited seven weeks to have a big huge battle take place between Jay/Hamilton and Red Panda. In a sense, we kinda get it, and when the action scenes DO show up they are a sight to behold…especially the finale’s battle scenes. But, I almost didn’t care because it’s not like we invested THAT much time in the dramatic overtones to make the ending battle scenes worthwhile. Instead, we got a lot Jay banging everything that moves with almost very little time being thrown in their for Hamilton, until the end when he gets a girlfriend.

There’s a formula for Deep Space 69. Jay’s penis gets him in a bunch of trouble and then he has to fight his way out of it. I get it. It works…but I’m not sure if it works for 12-minutes a week for eight episodes. As great as it is to have a series that embraces animated erotica the way this franchise does, the results are at best, overtly cliched and sometimes not worthy of the random scenes that showcase the occasional technical brilliance. I’m thinking Deep Space 69 is rooted in a bygone era of Youtube animation that doesn’t quite fit anymore on a paid-for streaming service, nor do the producers appear willing to advance the cause of the series. For a good analogy, when The Howard Stern Show, a radio show known for sexualizing traditional radio moved over to SiriusXM, a streaming service that allowed you to do everything under the sun, the show’s host at first went a little crazy with this format. And today, while still showing the occasional trademark traits that made that original franchise famous still show up every once in a while, Stern has instead turned his show into an hour-long formatted interview show that fits right at home with the rise of podcast interview shows that do the same. It’s brilliant, but it’s a different kind of brilliance that had to change as a result of a change of setting whence compared to the original radio show. Deep Space 69 has to make that change, and yes, keep some of the trademark jokes that got you four seasons, but take advantage of the fact that we have a longer series now on a streaming service that allows you to create for a rabid more yearnful fan base looking to get more bang for their buck. This is where Deep Space 69 has to go to stay pace with the rise of adult animation on streaming services. Because today, the franchise just looks stagnant in comparison.