Review: Bless the Harts “The Last Supper”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
When a new restaurant chain threatens to put local businesses out of business, the town rallies behind Jenny to make them a commercial that will best reflect Greenpoint and The Last Supper. Problem is, no one will stop pestering her about what they want the commercial to be, driving her insane with rage about the chaos. Thankfully Violet has been secretly taping everybody and puts together a commercial out of that. It’s still terrible, but the chain ends up not coming to Greenpoint anyway so everything is fine. Also I swear to god that John Cena guest starred in this episode but IMDB isn’t showing him as a credit.

OUR TAKE
Guys, seriously, listen to this guy’s voice and tell me that isn’t John Cena. Anyway, some obvious comparisons to similarly plotted episodes come to mind, particularly the Bob’s Burgers episode “Easy Com-mercial, Easy Go-mercial”, which also saw the main family scrambling to represent themselves on television, though with less dire stakes than this, which one might have put on a season finale. And indeed, this is one of the holdover episodes from Season 1 that they saved for this season. Whether it would be the actually finale is unclear since it’s listed as Episode 11 in the production codes, but either way it just seems kinda overblown. And even then it doesn’t compare to what I consider the best possible version of this sort of story thus far, that being the episode of the live action sitcom Community, “Documentary Filmmaking: Redux”, from its third (and best) season which does a whole lot more than this.

I’m still getting used to the animation style changes that I noticed from last time, which are still rather strange to look at and we still don’t have any clear explanation for why this occurred, but I guess we’re stuck with these for now. Ratings seem to be about where they were with the first season so I wouldn’t say this is anything close to a death sentence quite yet. Then there’s the fact that I completely forgot to mention that Kumail Nanjiani’s Jesus Christ didn’t show up at all last episode. Thankfully he does here for one brief scene, though I do wonder if he’s testing alright with the executives who may or may not be not very thrilled regarding this take on the famous character. Wait, I mean religious figure. I guess what I’m dreading is that they might retool the few things that made this show stand out from its peers, which made me think this episode might actually get rid of The Last Supper just to give this version of Jesus an exit. Thankfully this did not happen and Jesus lives to be an ambiguously imaginary friend in Jenny’s potentially damaged mind another day, but we’ll see for how long. This twenty two episode season is still quite young for Bless the Harts, with a lot left to be fully explored with its ever growing cast of characters, though I have to say this was probably not one of its best outings by a country mile.