Review: The Great North “Can’t Hardly Debate Adventure”

Overview

Aunt Dirt takes a new job at Lone Moose School; Wolf tries to impress Beef.

Our Take

We haven’t seen a good animated debate episode in a while. I mean, we’ve had a number of disagreement episodes, but having one set in a school Billy Madison style which is kind of what we got in this week’s episode of The Great North written by Marina Cockenberg, not a common trope. To be honest, with the episode titled the way it was I thought we were going to get some sort of coming-of-age episode where the protagonist finally gets to hook up with adoring eye-candy, but I’m pretty satisfied with what we got this week.

To be honest, I could’ve done without the entirety of Wolf attempting to impress his dad. For my money, whenever I hear about adults doing everything they can to impress their parents it’s definitely ick flags all over the place for me and even with Will Forte’s charm it’s really not enough to make me care about someone trying to impress their dad. Moreover I’m a tad disappointed where we couldn’t get a classic Beef “morale of the story” where he being a father is proud of his son no matter what regardless of how many back flips his son can pull off.

But really, the meat and potatoes of this week’s episode of The Great North is by far the debate plot. I found the tale funny enough that even with it’s obvious comparisons to one of the biggest Adam Sandler movies of all-time, the producers did enough to make the episode their own and did so with comical results. In fact, normally I don’t even like episodes with a lot of Judy because long stretches of Jenny Slate can be a bit nauseating but this one was pretty good.