Season Review: Bob’s Burgers Season 11

After 22 episodes and nearly 9 months, season 11 of Bob’s Burgers has come to a close. Looking back on this season of Bob’s, we’ve covered some interesting new ground, as well as retreaded some familiar territory. We saw episodes exploring more of Gene and Linda’s characters, as well as the now-requisite episode pitting Tina’s upstanding morals against her siblings chaotic craziness. By this point, it’s safe to say that every season of Bob’s Burgers is pretty good, but was season 11 actually good?

As I take a look on some previous episode reviews from season 11, this definitely seems like a bit of an uneven season. There were the usual hilarious hits that absolutely landed, like Linda’s search for the perfect holiday card or Tina’s bonding session with Bob in the finale. But there were also plenty of episodes that felt fine, but didn’t stand out in quite the same way that the best episodes of Bob’s manage to do. Particularly in the latter half of the season, it felt like some episodes weren’t quite as figured out or tightly put together as I would’ve liked.

The fourteenth episode of the season, Mr. Lonely Farts, promised to be one of those semi-rare Gene episodes that focus on the boy who’s usually there as a random soundboard to compliment other’s in the starring role. The concept of Gene having to stay home alone held a lot of promise, but as I say in my review of the episode, Gene’s storyline ended up feeling a bit undercooked due to how rushed it seemed. A few other underwhelming titles from the back half of season 11 include Some Kind of Fender Benderful (the new side characters weren’t unique enough!) and Bridge Over Troubled Rudy (some fun scenes that felt a little disconnected as a whole).

That’s not to say that the entire latter half of the season is subpar. Y Tu Tina También follows the at-this-point overused premise of Tina having to choose between her siblings and her own life, but the way it allows the eldest Belcher kid to live out her romantic fantasies through an Spanish-language cassette tape series was super novel and relatable. That episode proved to me that even if the show is repeating itself in some ways, which is bound to happen after over 100 episodes, the crew can still find ways to differentiate any given plot to make it unique.

Bob’s Burgers has gracing our televisions (and laptops/tablets/phones/etc) for over a decade now. After so many years and so many seasons, it might be fair to wonder just how much longer the hit can continue. How long are the show’s legs? Luckily, even with so many episodes in the rearview mirror, this season of Bob’s still shows that there’s plenty of ground ahead to cover. While each season is special in its own way, and the magic of early seasons is never going to be replicated in later seasons (nor should anyone expect it), Bob’s is one of those shows that’s so near and dear to me heart that I hope it keeps going for as long as the creators think they’re able to continue telling important stories.