Review: The Great North “Sexi Moose Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Beef Tobin lives in the wilderness of Alaska along with his four children: Wolf, Ham, Judy, and Moon. Wolf’s fiancé Honeybee has moved in with them, too. It’s Judy’s sweet sixteen, and Beef has a big day planned to celebrate the special occasion: going out boating like they always do.

Judy, meanwhile, has other plans. She’s just secured a job at the photography studio in the local mall, but has no idea how to tell her set-in-his-ways father about it. When Beef takes the group on a surprise trip to the mall to pick up a birthday present for Judy from said photo studio, things come to a head and the beans get spilled. Beef winds up running off and getting stuck at the bottom of a ravine. Thankfully, Judy finds him and the two of them come out of it with a better understanding of themselves and each other.

Our Take:

Coming from many of the minds behind Bob’s Burgers (Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin are both credited as creators), the Great North’s premiere episode is full of a lot of the same stuff you’d find in an average episode of Bob’s Burgers. There’s eccentric young family members wise beyond their years, older cast members who aren’t so wise, and jokes that go a mile a minute. There’s also a healthy dose of despair underlying everything in the form of Beef’s suppressing the emotions surrounding his wife’s sudden and unplanned departure. But just because The Great North has many of the trademarks of Bob’s Burgers doesn’t mean it can go toe to toe with its forerunner.

In a comedy like this, the cast members are one of the most important parts of the show. From the comedic delivery to the overall rapport of the group, a good cast can make or break a series.  As the patriarch of the Tobin family, Beef is wonderfully portrayed by Nick Offerman. He encapsulates the macho man with an emotional core just perfectly. I enjoyed Jenny Slate’s performance as Judy, too. Will Forte plays Wolf, who might be the funniest family member, well. The rest of the cast is lined with talent like Dulce Sloan, Paul Rust, and Alanis Morissette playing a gigantic Northern Lights version of herself.

Beef and Judy are definitely the stand outs so far, which makes sense since this initial pilot episode is based around the two of them. Beef is a single dad raising a family by himself in Alaska, and Judy is a teenager and the only girl in the family besides Honeybee, so the dynamic between them is interesting. Sure, a teenager striking out on her first steps toward adulthood may not be the most original concept in the world, but it makes a solid setting to introduce us to the world of the Great North and the characters who inhibit it.

 Sexi Moose Adventure does a fairly good job of doing the things a premiere has to do, like introducing the main cast, setting up their relationships, and delivering plenty of exposition, while not neglecting the things that make a show entertaining. The style of comedy is pulled straight from Bob’s Burgers, with the offbeat characters providing plenty of opportunities for quirky jokes, puns, and general weirdness. Ham and Moon are probably the least interesting characters so far — they both seem pretty stereotypical in their roles, with Ham being the dumb, awkward older teen while Moon is the creepily precocious youngest member of the family.

While the Great North isn’t as immediately entertaining as Bob’s Burgers, I was fairly impressed with the show’s premiere. Technically, Sexi Moose Adventure is the pilot episode, and pilot episodes are always the hardest thing to pull off. We haven’t had time to build any kind of connection or affection with this cast yet, and I think this gets things off to an impressive start. Nick Offerman is a fantastic pick to provide a reliably funny anchor of the show, and the setting in Alaska promises to present some challenging dilemmas and conflicts — I’m sure a rampaging moose is just the beginning.