Season Review: Bless the Harts Season One

Fox Animation welcomes a new family to the Sunday Primetime table for the first time in a LONG time. The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, and Family Guy have held a tight grip on the line up for a good long while, but it’s been time for something fresh and unique. Brought to us from former King of the Hill and SNL writer Emily Spivey, Bless the Harts surprisingly doesn’t make use of the “dysfunctional married couple with three quirky kids” model shared by its peers and instead has its main cast quartet made up mostly of three generations of women, the most central, Kristen Wiig’s “Jenny Hart”, being both a single mother and not married to her boyfriend Wayne, which certainly sets the show apart in many nuanced ways from the rest of the shows it shares Sunday nights with. This provides the opportunity for chances to explore the more modern nuances in these relationships, which the show does to varying effect.

Though these differences can only carry the show so far before the plot, comedy, and character writing need to kick in. And as this is the show’s first season, there are clearly some growing pains that it needs to get through, not that that’s especially rare compared to The Simpsons’, Family Guy’s, or Bob’s Burgers’ own premiere seasons. Thus far, Jenny, her mother Betty, and Wayne have all proven to be able to drive plots well enough on their own dynamic personalities, even if the plots themselves don’t always end up especially original or funny. In contrast, daughter Violet ends up being the weak link of the four in terms of writing, being written more passive or as a moral center than a character, with some residual traits pulled from Daria, Lisa Simpson, or even Hayley Smith as the left leaning mood killer. We could definitely use more stories about her driving things on her own, like how Jenny’s working class struggles, Betty’s rivalry with a frenemy, or Wayne’s attempts at being handy and helpful drive their stories.

Bless the Harts initially started with a season of thirteen episodes, chopped to ten when a second season was greenlit. That might have been a blessing in disguise, as this first season most definitely has more misses than hits in its line up which three more episodes likely wouldn’t have helped at this point. With this extra time to work on these and future episodes while taking in reception from this season, I think the next will really benefit in the long term. Plus, it gets the rare honor of being a new Fox animated show that actually GOT a second season, which has not happened since Bob’s Burgers got its first renewal at the start of the decade. Fox is thinking outside the box to keep its adult animation thriving, which hopefully means more chances for exploration in future seasons. I’ll tell you what, these Harts are quite blessed to be given the chance to be Fox’s next enduring animated series.