Review: Bless the Harts “The McEntire Truth”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Betty and Crystal Lynn team up to call Marjune Culpepper on her possible BS backstory while Violet and her friend David try and muster up the effort to finish the Presidential fitness exam.

OUR TAKE

This week may have probably been the worst for this new art style. Everything looked REALLY off more often than not, and when it looked fine, it was still unsettling to see. I do not know what possessed them to make the change to what might be Flash, but it really has not served the series well and might be part of the reason the ratings are kinda dipping compared to last season. Though the other part of that could be that the series does not seem to really know what to do with Violet, who still looks to be having some sort of writing identity crisis between Steve from American Dad and Daria. Or maybe she’s trying to be Hayley. She’s incredibly unmotivated but also weird and quirky BUT ALSO very solidly against the system to the point that she’s turning on her gay gym teacher to avoid working out. Also her friend David is…well, I’m not sure what to think. He’s barely even his own character, to the point that I feel like losing him wouldn’t really lose much. I almost feel like they should give him his own episode just to see if he sinks or swims.

Then again, we seem to be hitting the point where Bless the Harts may simply not know what it wants to be. This is acceptable in a first season when things are fresh and they’re checking if jokes are landing, but now it’s starting to feel like there isn’t a specific flavor or center they’re trying to reach, just a mish mash of other animated comedy identities that it never quite gets to. I guess that’s marginally better than Duncanville, which felt like an almost exact carbon copy of the other shows on the Fox lineup (and The Great North looks to be continuing that tradition much to my disappointment) but it just makes it feel unlikely that, for however much longer Fox Animation continues to exist in its current form (which may not be much longer given the gradual jump to streaming), that will be stuck in this sort of formula until its dying breath. But maybe that’s just being overly cynical on my part and Bless the Harts is about to hit a breakthrough. We’ll see whether or not that’s true next week before another two week break with the sequel to one of the first season’s episodes that I didn’t super care for but may turn me around this time.