Season Review: Super Team Canada Season One
We’ve wrapped the first season of Super Team Canada! For those that don’t know, the series is created by Canadian Emmy-winning writers, and brothers, Robert Cohen (HBO’s SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE, THE BIG BANG THEORY) and Joel H. Cohen (THE SIMPSONS). The animated comedy Super Team Canada focuses on the exploits of six, little-known Canadian superheroes trying to save the world from evil giant robots, an unemployed octopus, and needy hardware store clerks. The stakes are high for these stereotypically underdog Canadian super-unknowns, who are called in as Earth’s last resort when all the other superheroes have been destroyed defending the world from various outlandish threats, ranging from giant robots to geriatric aliens.
One of the show’s strengths seems to be its voice cast, which features prominent Canadian talent like producer Will Arnett and Cobie Smulders but also the likes of Kevin McDonald, Charles Demers, Brian Drummond, Ceara Morgana and Veena Sood. Jay Baruchel guest stars, and Bryan Adams performs the theme song for the show. Their performances reportedly bring a lot of personality to the quirky heroes and the animation style is a retro 2D, which pays homage to classic Saturday morning superhero cartoons.
Because the series is presented in quarter-hours, the show is fast-paced and joke-dense, doing it’s best to take advantage of the lack of real estate provided by the series’ runtime. Some of the jokes are raunchy, and relies significantly on Canadian stereotypes and references which it struggles to move beyond at times which can make the show seem repetitive at times. Canadian audiences, might find this self-referential humor entertaining, international audiences may find it repetitive and uninspired.
Ultimately, whether you enjoy Super Team Canada might depend on your tolerance for over-the-top Canadian stereotypes and its specific brand of absurd, adult humor which doesn’t really push the needle that much in it’s execution nor challenges constructs put up by modern-day Canadian censures. If you enjoy proudly Canadian content and fast-paced, irreverent comedy, it might be worth checking out. However, if you’re looking for something more nuanced or less reliant on national clichés, this show might not be for you.
There's got to be some kind of twist that's going to happen with this. I don't know if they're setting up an April Fool's joke now or what's going on, but it seems too strange that they'd suddenly reverse on doing a fourth and fifth season after the show was already renewed and they were even just talking about working on those seasons like a couple months ago or something. Or maybe the two episodes yet to release will secretly somehow each be like a "season" in themselves?