Series Review: The Goodbye Family

Having confidence in an idea you have takes a lot of guts, especially taking it across several different mediums. Such is the case with The Goodbye Family, the brainchild of author-illustrator-songwriter Lorin Morgan-Richards, who first conceived of the characters, a mortician family living in an old western town, after an apparently very inspiring trip. He first drew them on cards in 2009, then started including him in his other works in 2012, before giving them their own comic strip in 2017 and, eventually making his own animated series starting in 2021, which is still going strong on both Youtube and Tubi. The series follows, as mentioned, the matriarch mortician Pyridine, her hearse driving husband Otis who loves pickles, their super strong daughter Orphie (and odd possible son Kepla), and a bunch of other weird townsfolk who populate the rest of the setting. Season Two also introduces the Helios Family (pronounced Hello) who are, as you might imagine, polar opposites of the Goodbyes and turn out to be sunlight eating vampires, though their skin doesn’t sparkle unfortunately. Sounds like the recipe for a really solid show, wouldn’t you say? And you might be right about that if the production didn’t end up feeling so hastily made.

While I do like the concept of a show about a family with dark aesthetics and humor, as well as paranormal know-how, living in a normal-ish town, along with a western flavor to it…I can’t say this show really fulfills its potential. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with its source material, just everything else around it. I realize animation is very hard to produce, especially independently, but this cartoon barely feels animated at all at times, with facial expressions staying mostly the same regardless of the characters’ emotions, arm and leg movements feeling really stiff, and maybe this is just a Tubi issue, but the framerate gets distractingly laggy at times. The voices, provided by Stone-Richards and his friends and family, are fine for what they need to be…most of the time, but it’s not helped by the hit or miss audio quality. All of these things do gradually improve over time, possibly as the animators and actors get more used to making the show, but all of these issues are simply too distracting to ignore. Then again, it does take a lot of effort to even make a cartoon in the first place, so kudos to them for making over a dozen episodes so far, but I gotta be honest about my viewing experience.

Regardless of my thoughts, I can certainly see this show, or the books with these characters in them, being some kids favorite. Plenty of kids gravitate towards to darker and more macabre humor that things like The Goodbye Family provides in spades. However, in terms of cartoons, they could do a lot better than this one. Maybe with enough time and practice, as well as perhaps getting enough money, there may end up being a more polished version of this series that will enlighten people to the real highlights of this loving group of weirdos. Sadly, the one on Tubi and Youtube is not it and I don’t see much possibility of it getting much general appeal. But that’s also fine, sometimes you must make a story because you and the people you know like it, and it seems like it’s accomplishing just that for Morgan-Richards and his community. Again, it takes so much confidence and initiative to make so much in the first place and I wish I had even an iota of that for my own ideas. So, to whoever is a fan of The Goodbye Family, I wish you well. If this review has, paradoxically, gotten you to check it out, then more power to you. And with that, I wish you a long Goodbye, family.