Review: Mr. Pickles “A.D.D.”

Astronaut Dolphin Detective is my new favorite show.

Spoilers Below

In this week’s episode, appropriately and cleverly named “A.D.D”, the action is all over the place, and in this case, that’s a great thing. While technically an episode of Mr. Pickles, it’s not actually an episode of Mr. Pickles. Let me explain. Right after the theme song, in fact, interrupting the theme song, a group of the town’s people are watching their favorite show, Astronaut Dolphin Detective, when our favorite border collie stop his usual deadly jog to see what the fuss is about.

Enter ADD, where the aquatic star takes no guff, enjoys sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and still gets the job done. I toke the show as a friendly jab to 80’s action TV shows such as Magnum PI, except ramped up to 11. It’s the typical heroic action hero formula, only in space, with a lot more banging and substance abuse.  Humorously enough, the show takes place in the same universe as Mr. Pickles, because early on, the main antagonist, who is an evil alien shrimp, is actually watching one of my favorite episodes of the show, the “Cheeseman” episode.

I usually love it when shows try something rarely explored, such as South Park’s entire Phillip and Terrance episode which was the April Fools joke for the season 2 premiere. It made a lot of people angry and is known as one of the worst episodes of the series, but I really like it because it was uncharted territory and showed that Matt and Trey were willing to do something unique on a whim. Anyways, it’s rare that television series do the “show within a show” bit but it’s usually a rewarding risk to take, in my opinion. It breaks the monotony and allows the writers to essentially air a pilot of a separate show to get the viewers’ reactions to it. It’s hard to tell whether Astronaut Dolphin Detective would actually make a good series on its own, or the show would get boring after a few episodes of the same premise and cliches, but at least in this single episode, ADD did it right with all of the 80’s formulaic shows spoofed in a funny and entertaining way.