Season Review: HouseBroken Season Two

Ahead of HouseBroken’s first season premiere, FOX approached me to do a feature interview with the creators of the upcoming new animated comedy slated to premiere as part of the network’s launch of a secondary evening of Animation Domination. Jumping on a Zoom with Gabrielle Allan, Jennifer Crittenden, and Clea DuVall, I thought the interview went great. Everyone was super great and after watching one of the early episodes that featured Honey (Lisa Kudrow) and Chief (Nat Faxon) finding their owner’s sex toys, I though a very apropo title for our interview was “FOX Readying To Drown Viewers In Pussy Cats With New Season Of HouseBroken”. The story posted, the traffic was FLYING, and I was even offering up a fair deal to the network to let me wrap Bubbleblabber in all sorts of HouseBroken graphics to promote the new series.

Unfortunately, the very next day, the network made us change the title with this explanation coming from their PR department:

To us, it comes off inappropriate, especially after we put our 3 female creators on the call for the interview.  I know if they or their agents/managers/publicists see this, they are going to feel disrespected by it and I can’t in good conscious ever ask them to do another interview with Bubble Blabber again. I understand a catchy headline helping with clicks, but this one is really gross. We ask that you please change it so that we can continue working together in the future.

This is when I knew HouseBroken was doomed. It should be noted, nobody from the HouseBroken production camp messaged me complaining about the title and we’ve since done numerous stories about the franchise. We changed the title, and I’ve regretted it ever since, and it’s this sort of attitude that kills off adult animation series so fast, especially on a network that is a sister partners with FOX News, a network that routinely doesn’t give a fuck, but somehow my naughty title caught the ire of FOX’s PR. Since this has happened, FOX has killed off the likes of other animated fare like Bless The Harts, Duncanville, and really the entirety of the second night of Animation Domination in general. More original series are on the way with Krapopolis coming this Fall and Grimsburg slated to hit midseason, but if FOX doesn’t get its act together, those series won’t last long either, even IF they’ve both been renewed for numerous seasons each already.

It doesn’t help that FOX has also messed with the schedules for premiere episodes for Bless the Harts, Duncanville, and HouseBroken anyhow, with half of Duncanville’s third season not even airing on FOX and instead premiering on Hulu. For what it’s worth, FOX DID premiere 19 episodes of a mix of season two and three episodes of HouseBroken starting Christmas 2022 and going on and off starting March 2023 and moving through August of the same year. Dual premiere weeks, NASCAR reschedules, and even some episodes premiering on Hulu first before they premiered on FOX are the ingredients for a FOX cancellation, but I wouldn’t blame this a bit on the producers.

This series, was in for a bumpy road from the get-go. Straying from 99 percent of the FOX adult animated comedies, HouseBroken never focused on anyone family and instead focused on a massive group therapy session consisting of a number of pets that live in and around Hollywood, California. Pets belonging to celebrities, crazy people, and those just love animals, are chief among a gaggle of characters that will often leave the group and meander into all parts of the city up to and including to the woods, the local dog park, the zoo, other houses, and more, giving limitless possibilities as to where animals would go to and all of the crazy adventures that they have.

The voice cast is rock solid for this one, with the likes of Will Forte, Jason Mantzoukas, Sharon Horgan, Sam Richardson, Tony Hale and others joining the aforementioned DuVall, Kudrow, and Faxon. Moreover, the guest voice cast was even more bonkers, and increasingly so as the show went on with Julia Louise-Dreyfus, Brie Larson, Pedro Pascal, David Space, I mean the list goes on-and-on…and not ONE press release about any of them…isn’t this grand?

Of course, every animated comedy has its cliches, but HouseBroken’s dynamic was just so fresh for the network that if FOX had given it a real bone, this one could’ve gone far. I get that FOX is really trying to get into the 100 percent ownership thing and that this series has a couple of additional production companies attached to it other than it’s own, but HouseBroken deserved better than the dog house treatment the franchise had received over the better part of three years.