Review: The Great North “Romantic Meat-Based Adventure”;”Curl Interrupted Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

In Romantic Meat-Based Adventure, Judy and the rest of the family try to get their dad Beef back on the singles market so that he doesn’t die alone. They manage to convince him to attend a meat auction slash singles mixer, and he even meets a nice lady who likes fishing. In the end, though, it wasn’t only Beef having relationship troubles — Judy has issues herself.

Beef’s adult curling team isn’t exactly a world class outfit. They’d love to win more games, and there’s someone who thinks she can help them with that: Judy. Unfortunately, there’s one problem. Just has been banned from the curling team due to devilish, mean-spirited behavior. She promises she can keep herself under control, but when it comes time for her to coach Beef’s team, the competitive spirit comes through.

Our Take:

The Great North has aired around a month’s worth of episodes now, but compared to other long-running animated shows like Bob’s Burgers and The Simpsons, it’s still very much the new kid on the block. Due to that, it’s still a bit of a surprise to see what topics, characters, and situations the writers choose to handle in a given episode. Now Fox has released two episodes from the show online early, and it’s already looking like a pattern is emerging.

Judy and Beef share the spotlight in both Romantic Meat-Based Adventure and Curl Interrupted Adventure. As someone with one foot in the imaginative era of childhood and the other foot in the uncharted territory of teenage-hood, Judy makes a compelling cast member to focus on. Beef is a bit less interesting as a character to me so far, but hey, he’s a gruff wilderness guy voiced by Nick Offerman who’s not afraid to try out an improv scene or two with his daughter. The two of them have a solid dynamic together, although not as instantly classic as the numerous Bob and Louise episodes from Bob’s Burgers, of which The Great North is a kind of spiritual spinoff.

Romantic Meat-Based Adventure is certainly my favorite of the two episodes. Its theme of getting back out there after being left or rejected is something most people can relate to, which makes it easy to laugh while also commiserating with Beef’s struggles to figure out dating again. There’s plenty of comedy to be mined from his attempts at small talk — it always goes back to fishing with him! The episode does a fine job tying Judy’s own troubles into her passion to fix her father. They say we dislike in others what we dislike in ourselves, so it was nice to see Judy learn from her dad’s positive attitude and channel it into her own love life. The attempts at humor in Judy’s romance aren’t as successful, with her blurting out excuses to run away that involve things like farts and taxes, coming off less realistic and more manufactured.

In Curl Interrupted Adventure, Beef and Judy are paired together again as she tries to atone for past curling sins and help his team win a match. While not quite as funny as the previous episode, I enjoyed the focus on the two of them spending time together, and on the ending realization that, if it can’t be curling that brings them closer, they will have to find other activities that they both enjoy participating in. The B-plot sees the rest of the crew trying to make Wolf’s dreams of helping tourists achieve love going unsuccessfully, although they do take in a nice German man.

It hasn’t been the fastest start out of the gate for The Great North, especially since it’s already been derailed once by NASCAR, but the show continues to be an entertaining watch if you can get past the ‘try a little too hard’ comedic style. There’s a lot to enjoy here, but I wouldn’t call The Great North great quite yet.