Season Review: Breaking Bear Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Three bear siblings decide they need to start selling drugs to raise money to save their home after the gas companies start fracking next to their cave.  Recruiting other forest animals, they will face whatever comes before them.

Our Take:     

“Breaking Bad” is considered one of the best modern shows in television history.  Thanks to its intense premise, memorable characters, and strong direction, the crime drama involving a chemistry teacher/student partnership and selling meth made a colossal impact in pop culture.  So much so that someone decided it was a good idea to create an animated version of the concept, but with bears.  I guess they themselves have indulged in some drugs while coming up with this idea.  That concept became Breaking Bear, the latest adult animated series that premiered exclusively on Tubi, also known as the best streaming service that doesn’t increase its prices every few months.

Consisting of eight episodes, the premise in Breaking Bear is precisely what we would expect from the title alone.  It’s a mixture of “Breaking Bad” and “We Bare Bears”, if the latter consists of only three grizzly bears, where the siblings, Jer (Brendan Fraser), Blair (Sarah Michelle Gellar), and Alistair (Josh Gad), run a drug empire to save their forest home from an oil company.  However, they ended up having to deal with opposing threats that could derail their efforts to sell honey nut meth, such as the Wolf Queen (Elizabeth Hurley) and the Nazi-loving furries.  Of course, since this is for mature audiences only, the show packs in plenty of adult humor, pop culture references, and crazy shenanigans to accompany its characters’ drug-infused quest.  The most notable example is the bears’ human ally, Dwight Salter (Chris Parnell), a teacher/drug dealer who’s a reference to Bryan Cranston’s character from “Breaking Bad”.

While Tubi is the best place to uncover new or surreal content, my relationship with its adult animation lineup has been pretty clunky so far.  They’re packed with inventive ideas, but execution-wise, they lack the narrative and entertainment impact to match their portrayal of risqué humor.  “The Freak Brothers” was okay at best based on my experience with its second season, while “Toon World Express” was just unwatchable, despite the various animation styles.  So I wasn’t too thrilled about reviewing Breaking Bear out of fear of being overwhelmed by its overreliance on gross-out gags and adult humor, even though it carries big names like Brendan Fraser and Josh Gad.  After watching the first two episodes, my concerns were fully realized.  As usual, the show is very adult in nature, and its concept would’ve been less repetitive if it were designed as a movie rather than an eight-episode series.  But is it funny enough to be at least entertaining?  Well, that would depend on your sense of humor.

If you enjoy a series that’s filled with jokes involving sex, drugs, pop culture, racism, and modern trends like “4/20”, Breaking Bear offers plenty of those benefits that’ll get you high on its insanity.  While a strength by its own standards, it also becomes a weakness based on the execution.  This is another adult animated series that carries itself with its references, puns, and running gags rather than combining them with a compelling narrative.  For the latter, we have Jer as a naive, perverted big brother who develops a taste for human flesh; Blair is the smart sister who wants to stop being codependent, and Alistair gets hooked up on meth.  The result is a repetitive, by-the-book, and constantly gross series that needs a stronger narrative dose, complete with a typical “save the environment” premise.  

There have been some jokes that should’ve been funny, but come off as obvious and surprisingly unfunny regarding the modern era it’s poking fun at.  I don’t mind this humor as long as the punchline and delivery are convincing enough to be funny.  Instead, it just comes off as desperate, tedious, and dumb for the wrong reasons, despite the efforts made by its voice cast.  What sucks is that some of its actors, like Fraser and Gad, are pretty funny, and they delivered some solid performances as their respective characters.  It’s that the show’s script compelled them to resort to plenty of kink gags and drug jokes.  Josh Gad brought some raunchy energy into Alistair, particularly when the character is high on meth, with the animation expressing his sketchy outlines and wacky expressions for his meth overdose.  Brendan Fraser has been having an impressive comeback in his career, and while his performance as Jer isn’t special enough to continue his streak, it’s still nice to see him continue to work after growing up watching him in the 2000s.

Breaking Bear resembles something the Asylum would’ve come up with if it was planning a schlocky ripoff of “Breaking Bad”.  While not the worst show I’ve seen this year, it’s also a mediocre animated drug that struggles to balance its surreal premise with constant adult humor.  The only saving graces that kept this series high are its voice cast and serviceable animation.  Other than that, it’s another example of an adult animated series trying a bit too hard at being adult in its humor and characters.  It does leave me growling in frustration that there hasn’t been a Tubi-exclusive series that I like yet, but it is what it is.  It’s not a complete waste of my time, but it is “beary” rough around the edges.