Review: Smiling Friends “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!”

Overview:

After a successful first season of turning frowns upside down, Charlie, Pim, Glep, and all of your favorite Smiling Friends kick back for some much needed R & R in the Southern hemisphere. Each of the Smiling Friends have their own idea of what the perfect paradise looks like, but it suddenly looks like none of their fantasies will come to fruition as this vacation takes an unexpected turn before it can even get started.

Our Take:

Part of the fun in Smiling Friends is that it’s a series that presents a level of comedy and storytelling that’s so acerbic that it often has no need for any of the standard tropes of television comedies. Smiling Friends loves to let its ideas evolve unencumbered and defy convention, but it’s always entertaining when the series does offer its own satirical take on a sitcom staple. In the case of “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!,” it’s television’s gaudy tradition for big holiday event specials where the cast gets some rest and relaxation in Hawaii, Disney World, or any destination location. The Simpsons has even turned this trope into a running trend that’s essentially become synonymous with lazy writing whenever Homer walks into the living room and proudly declares, “The Simpsons are going to *INSERT DESTINATION HERE*!”

These specials tend to be low-hanging fruit in the first place and rarely are these destination holiday episodes anyone’s favorite entry in the series. Smiling Friends playfully leans into this energy for an installment that may not be its absolute best, but it’s far from the worst. Furthermore, the impact of “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” hits harder as a segregated “summer special” as opposed to if it just aired in the middle of the season. The desire to isolate and celebrate what’s otherwise a very silly and pointless episode adds another layer to the surreal comedy of Smiling Friends. The sheer concept of a summer special that celebrates Brazil is completely incongruous to the rest of the series, but it’s the random, frivolous nature of this one-off episode that makes it such a treat and the perfect surprise.

It’s a nice change of pace that this episode at least attempts to ostensibly function as a vacation for these characters and explore what their downtime looks like. It’s satisfying to watch the stress and complications that are formed out of these characters’ attempts to relax and do as little as possible. It’d have been very easy for this to be an episode where the Smiling Friends go to Brazil in an effort to spread their healing power of positivity to these international frowns and so it’s appreciated that it avoids this temptation. That’s not to say that an episode that does explore this territory wouldn’t be successful, but the seemingly low stakes approach that’s taken in “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” feels more appropriate.

It’s pure Smiling Friends to take an episode that goes to a place that’s as beautiful as Brazil and full of such exciting sights–and on Mardi Gras, no less–only for the characters to never leave the airport for the duration of the episode. “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” intentionally mocks big destination episodes and actively rebels against the concept, as if Adult Swim forced Smiling Friends to engage in some big cross-promotion with the Republic of Brazil. The title is borderline sarcastic. 

“The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” is truly a brilliant case of taking an extended argument that gets beyond out of hand and doesn’t just derail the entire episode, but consume the entire episode so that there’s nothing else to focus on here. Not only do the characters never get to leave the airport, but they barely get to go beyond the escalator before their misunderstanding takes everything up and literally stops the vacation in its tracks. Some people may absolutely loathe how this episode “wastes” the audience’s time, but it seems as if those who are fans of Smiling Friends will absolutely adore how this episode trolls them and the nature of these big vacation episodes. 

This makes this an episode of Smiling Friends that may be polarizing to a fraction of the audience, but those that are into it will likely absolutely love this silly exercise in minutiae. It’s once again one of the benefits of having a show that’s a quarter-hour in length and it’s the type of extended gag that’s so much harder to execute in a half-hour series. What “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” pulls off even feels reminiscent of the experimental episodes of Adult Swim’s earliest series’ like Sealab 2021’s “Fusebox.” It’s a glorious throwback to the type of experiments that originally helped Adult Swim make their mark through the series that for all intents and purposes is positioned to be the face of the network’s future.

Smiling Friends is still so fresh in its life that any new content is going to come as a treat. The first season felt full enough that a “bonus” episode is hardly necessary, but “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” is as strong as any other installment from the show’s first season. This isn’t some pivotal story that will bridge the gap between the series’ two first seasons and those that miss this entry won’t be lost when new episodes properly come around. “The Smiling Friends Go To Brazil!” is more of this burgeoning surreal comedy series at its best and most bizarre. This isn’t a disposable episode that was churned out at the last minute, nor is it some super-sized celebration that’s worthy of the moniker of “special.” That being said, it’s proof that Smiling Friends has plenty of fuel left in its tank and that sillier–and possibly more international–hijinks are to come. There are a lot of frowns in the Southern hemisphere.